Bittorrent grew out of MojoNation, a "distributed, peer to peer, file store", per wikipedia. So it already had a business sponsoring it.
Distributing content tracking is much harder than distributing the content, and if they'd waiting to solve that problem before publishing code, it probably would have died. I think there's a lesson here: don't wait to solve all your problems before you launch, because even if some of them are insoluble, the parts you have solved might be useful enough to be successful. I suppose other people have more concisely summed that up as "release early; release often", eh?
Distributing content tracking is much harder than distributing the content, and if they'd waiting to solve that problem before publishing code, it probably would have died. I think there's a lesson here: don't wait to solve all your problems before you launch, because even if some of them are insoluble, the parts you have solved might be useful enough to be successful. I suppose other people have more concisely summed that up as "release early; release often", eh?