#1 - Azureus

Azureus is the #1 application on SourceForge today. It needs little introduction and is both known and used throughout the world.

Some of the strengths of Azureus are very subtle: for one, it lets users download multiple files within a single window. By contrast, the very first BitTorrent client (known as "BitTorrent", naturally) started a new instance per torrent being downloaded. More importantly, Azureus also provides a wealth of statistics including download and upload speeds, time remaining, percentage of each file completed, and information on the "pieces" of each file still required. It reports finely-grained information which lets torrent tweakers really get a handle on what's happening.

Another strong plus of Azureus is its support for plug-ins. Any savvy coder can make an Azureus plug-in to enhance its feature set. One of the most popular available permits downloads to be scheduled, which aids broadband users who have a download quota but a "free" unmetered period at night.

Azureus is written in Java, which makes it highly portable. It will run on any system with a Java interpreter - which like the apps above, covers Windows, Linux and MacOS. However, in another sense, Azureus has drawn some criticism over its use of Java. Various quirks have, at times, caused Java apps to appear to consume a CPU's entire time. A very lean competitor, uTorrent, has taken some of Azureus' popularity in recent times, but uTorrent is not open source and is consequently far less customisable. Further, it is Windows-only.

And that's that: these are the hottest 10 open source apps in production today. They are the most active SourceForge projects representing the amount of work going into them. They are stable and the project teams are responding to bug notices and feature requests. They all have rich utility from home users through to large corporsations. Best of all, they're free and their code is freely available and freely modifiable.

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