Towards the end of its life, Vuze started adding crap like ads in the sidepanel and spyware in the installer. Plus a bunch of useless features like DVD burning and 'content network'. My guess is the two main devs got involved with some investors at the time of the Azureus rename and didn't like the way it was heading, so forked the project and rebranded to BiglyBT so they could go it on their own. Since it was open source, and mostly their own code, they couldn't really stop them. Edit: More info at TF.

Sad thing is, many people are blissfully unaware of the history and still running Vuze to this day - when it hasn't been touched in 6+ years. Amazingly the site is still up but nobody's home, so its very risky to be using an out-of-date client like that with a spyware-laden installer - with the very real possibility of the binaries being switched out. (Their SSL cert has lapsed several times.)

The good news is, if anyone's still running Vuze, BiglyBT is a straight swap-out.

[–] brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

The ads were a Vuze thing, not BiglyBT.

When the devs left Vuze and forked the code into BiglyBT they never included ads or anything like that. That's what the comment meant, that since day 1 of the BiglyBT fork it did not include the ad junk that Vuze has.