Somebody’s loss is always somebody’s gain. The same happened in the case of the popular torrent search engine Strike which has just gone open source. Now, torrent lovers and film fans can build their own custom torrent search engine based on Strike code.
Strike shut down permanently following a lawsuit from the RIAA. However, Strike developer Andrew Sampson has now released the search engine’s source code to the public.
Strike was engulfed in a tortuous legal battle with RIAA which Sampson reportedly settled for a massive $3 million. Since the legal disputes started, Strike has been offline for weeks. Even though the site was as good as dead, Sampson said that it still got million visitors daily who were served pages cached by CloudFlare. In addition, many external services called on the site’s defunct API.
Seeing the popularity of Strike, Sampson decide to make the code available for others, releasing it under an open source license.
“I don’t want to leave thousands of developers hanging; the API received over 25,000,000 unique requests a month, not to mention the millions of unique users we received every month,” Sampson told Torrent Freak.
“I wanted to leave something, it may not be the prettiest thing, but the least I can do is extend an olive branch and give people a small tool set for hosting their own search engines.”
Anyone with coding knowledge can now set up a custom torrent search engine, replicating the Strike code. The only thing that’s missing are the actual torrent scrapers. After consulting his lawyers, Sampson decided not to make those public.
Staying away from torrents after the Strike debacle, Sampson is now working on a new project called Ulterius. This is an open source C# based framework that allows users to manage windows based systems from any HTML5 enabled browser.
“I received a lot of support from the community during this, I can only hope they like what I make next. I’m 20 years old, so I’m just getting started,” he concludes.