Mainly because I am not ready to share my DHT indexing implementation. It's the culmination of years of working with BitTorrent and DHTs and I'd like to get something back for it one day. However I do dogfood Cove and want people to have that experience too.

I would think the only thing you would get out of such work is a sternly worded cease and desist from a big entity so you might as well open-source this and let somebody else take the torch in case you are shut down.

I mean I'd use such software (and huge DBs like that of Skytorrentz) for research purposes because to me distribution is hugely interesting as a hobby but many courts won't see it that way, and we know a lot of them are influenced by copyrights holders.

Thanks for your insight!