Frank Wiles wrote:
Maybe I'm a weirdo, but if HTTP and FTP work and the projects can afford the bandwidth why would they? Just another service they would have to maintain.
They _can't_ afford the bandwidth. SourceForge and Gentoo in particular rely heavily on mirrors. I wouldn't be surprised if the bandwidth for the other projects was donated or subsidized by a third party.
The main reason someone uses BitTorrent is to avoid having to pay for all of the bandwidth costs associated with large projects. There is no other real reason to switch, other than being new/different/cool which IMHO is a horrible reason.
Out of curiosity why would you want them to support BitTorrent?
I don't neccessarily want them to, I just want to know why they aren't. If you could save bandwidth costs or avoid the hassle of administering mirrors by setting up a BT feed, why wouldn't you? From Ethereal's perspective, doing this would be a no-brainer - even our modest-in-comparison bandwidth requirements cost a fair amount of money per month. I'm just wondering why it isn't common practice.