Only six weeks since lifting the curtain, JFrog have chosen to offer their social binary hub Bintray to the masses, after a successful beta.

The company, best known for their flagship binary repository Artifactory, told JAXenter in January that their newest product is part software distribution platform and part social network, and has been dubbed the “Github for binaries”.

Rather than deal directly with source code, self-service Bintray works with downloadable binaries. Each package uploaded to the service has a profile page, where standard details such as available downloads and bug trackers are displayed. Through the social network side of Bintray, developers can publish, download, share and promote software libraries within a specific community. Although inspired by the social phenomenon of Github, Bintray’s social aspects are more about reviewing libraries within stable projects, rather than creation.

The quick turnaround time from public beta to general release for the tool is largely down to the rapid uptake of active users so far, with thousands already part of the community. JFrog CTO, Yoav Landman explained that “continuing in beta was no longer an option” with a growing number of requests.

“In six weeks, JFrog learned that offering an easy self-service software distribution platform not only encourages developers to offer new versions and fixes more frequently, but most like to log-in and watch their projects being shared and used around the world,” Landman said.

One company already sounding their approval of Bintray is Netflix, with the online streaming giant using the tool to publish binaries for open source projects Asgard and Denominators, and with plans to use it with OSS projects.

“Publishing to Bintray has already saved us time and heartache,” explains Senior Software Engineer Justin Ryan.”We use Bintray to stage Gradle plugins not available elsewhere in a convenient single location.”

Other high profile Bintray users include OpenJDK, ElasticSearch and Gradle. Today’s announcement opens up the playing field to many more and JFrog are hoping to entice more developers towards their binary hub in the coming months.