From today, Transdroid will be distributed under a new license: the GNU General Public License. This is important because it have different permissions than the old license that was used. I want to briefly explain this choice.

I am a strong supporter of free and open-source software. Although not always possible, I believe software should be free to use, adapt, redistribute or even sell. However, I also believe that software released under such conditions should always be free. In particular, I believe we should encourage any derivative works to be free and open-source as well. Until now Transdroid was released with an Apache License 2.0, which is pretty much fully permissive. The change to the GPLv3, which is a copyleft license, ensures any work based on Transdroid version released in the future needs to be released under GPLv3 as well.

Any Transdroid version based on source code, documentation, meta files, etc. of revision 138 or earlier (released Transdroid version 0.13.5 and earlier and beta versions 0.14.0 beta 3 and earlier) are still under the Apache License 2.0, while from revision 139 and onwards (including any future Transdroid releases) will be licensed with GNU General Public License version 3. Transdroid reuses some code released by their own licenses (Apache and LGPL), which will be left in tact.

Hopefully this explains why all future works of (or based on) Transdroid will be open-source forever.

Ho ho ho, take a look at all the shiny new features that are present in the just-released Transdroid 0.13.0! Just in for your holiday shopping…

RSS feed support

Often websites expose an RSS feed for visitors to get news delivered right to them. Recently special torrent vieqs are becoming popular as well and luckily most of them actually are standardized. For example Final Gear, all about the Top Gear and Fifth Gear car shows, offer a feed for when new shows are available online.

Transdroid now supports such feeds! In your settings, add them using the URL and some personal name tag. Using the RSS menu option in the main screen a list of all your feeds will be shown. In the background it will check the number of unread items. Any new torrents available? Click the feed to get the full listing, after which adding them to your server is as easy as clicking the item you like! Every time you get into the listing the last item is remembered, so next time it can see again if any new torrents are available.

SSL support

As requested already a while back, Transdroid now finally supports SSL connections with your torrent client. All kudos go to q3aimi, who provided a full working code patch. See, the power of open-source software. It should work with self-signed certificates.

Filter 0KB/s transfers

Some people, especially those with many running torrents, like the list to be organized a little differently. One new way to filter the downloading and uploading lists is to enable the ‘Transfers >0KB/s only’ option from the ‘Filter list’ menu. All torrents that aren’t stopped or paused, but aren’t actively transferring data as well, will now show up in the inactive torrents list instead.

Overall server statistics

At the bottom of the screen Transdroid will now always show you the number of active downloads and uploads, as well as the total transfer speeds they consume. Going too fast…?

Transfer rate adjustment

Another feature requested by users helps you limit the total torrent transfer speeds. By selecting ‘Set transfer rates’ from the menu or touching the total statistics bar in the main screen, you can set the maximum upload and download torrent rates. Both values are in KB/s and you may use the reset button to cancel you fixed limits again. Works on all but Vuze for the moment (Vuze support will follow soon).

High-res icon

Finally, for all you lucky high-res (or rather, hdpi) device owners such as the Motorola Droid, the new version includes a nicer, more detailed icon. (The other artwork will get high-res version later as well.)