torrents Is there a market for this?

[whitebread]

Are there any existing torrent trackers specifically devoted to free, open-source software?

I'm interested in starting a tracker so I can see how they work, but I don't want to get sued :p. So I decided to start one that is dedicated solely to free, open-source software that can be legally redistributed.

I have a Windows virtual dedicated server. I don't know how to administer a Linux one. What software do I need to install?

Edit: is anybody interested in helping out?

[what]

Never installed it myself but I know a few trackers that quite happily use this: http://xbtt.sourceforge.net/tracker/

[Max Norris]

Are there any existing torrent trackers specifically devoted to free, open-source software?

Only one I know of off the top of my head would be LinuxTracker and that's specifically just Linux distributions and no other OS's. For individual projects themselves, they typically tend to get hosted on CodePlex, GitHub, SourceForge and the like and usually have a pretty good network behind it already, never mind their respective distros if it's something in Linuxland.. not sure if it's something that would get a lot of interest. At least in my opinion anyway, if I'm messing with source code, I'll grab it from whatever repository it's on so I can keep it up to date versus downloading them directly. It's just a lot easier to do a right-click->update in my file manager and move on versus locating a download, extracting the download, cleanup the leftovers afterwards, etc etc. Now for free but closed source projects, that might be more interesting, maybe. Some stuff gets hosted on horribly slow shared hosting sites.

[anarkhy]

I believe mininova.org distributes free music and stuff via torrent