Versions up to and including 3.4.2 were distributed under the MIT license. Very early versions released prior to Decemwere released into the public domain without a license. Prior to version 6.0, BitTorrent was written in Python, and was free software. It is now maintained by Cohen's company BitTorrent, Inc. Programmer Bram Cohen designed the protocol in April 2001 and released a first implementation of the BitTorrent client on 2 July 2001.
