ReadyNAS Duo v2: apt-get and free P2P clients?

Hello all,

before asking what I intented to ask, I wanted to provide a "feeling" of this unit: a brand new ReadyNAS Duo V2 unit, on which I installed a 2TB Samsung F4 in Flex-RAID/JBOD configuration. After having been an owner of a Maxtor Shared Storage II 500Mb unit for years, I have mixed feelings upon initial configuration. Specifically, transfer times are much - much higher on the RNAS, I was transferring at speeds ranging from 27to 34 Mbytes/sec, compared to the MSS meagre 10... I was struck by the lack of USB print sharing functionality, but that was not big deal.

What was a big deal, was (a) the lack of a package management architecture a la optware (which I had on MSS, after tinkering with some custom firmwares of course) and (b) the fact that there are no free software packages, at least for the P2P functionality I am looking for...

With regard to (a), on MSS II I had optware and from it, rtorrent. I was glad to see very good transfer rates from it, despite the meagre cpu of that thing. AFAIK, there is a similar environment that allows the download of Debian packages, but only on the SPARC-based ReadyNAS models :( I would really love, beg for having this ported to the ARM-based v2. This way, one could install rtorrent (even without the snappy-looking rutorrent interface) and a zillion of useful stuff.

Moving to (b): unless I am wrong here, there is only a transmission client which is not free??? Please, no disrespect to the author himself is intended here. The multiple question marks are mainly due to the fact that a platform in circulation for a year does not have a community to push developmert of FOSS software. Of course there might be development issues, but since at least one developer managed to produce a lot of plugins it might be possible! In the transmission port, the help pages indicate that this sofware is donate-ware. But visiting the page, one should definitely purchase it? I feel a bit stupid purchasing the newer/better version of the NAS, only to find out that even small apps have to be paid for? Comparing to the SPARC, there is super-poutin providing donate-ware software...

Please discuss, perhaps I am deeply misinformed here and I will definitely read onwards. It's just that I thought that a rich optware/opkg environment was either included or easily modified to be included in all NAS boxes, seems I did not study carefully...