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Why are there so few functional file sharing apps for Linux? AudioGalaxy blows chunks, Kazaa-Lite works only with Wine IF you have saintly patience and the spare dll's handy, and Limewire isn't a walk in the park either unless you have Java installed and the $PATH enviroment variable right - not to mention any needed dependencies. I'm not adverse to commandline (I prefer it for most administrative tasks) but I'm not going to run some bare bones text-based Gnutella client in a friggin terminal. I'm too spoiled for that.

I'm just surprised the Linux community hasn't made more noise about this... or is everyone dual booting?

This idea is right on, imho. Gnutella and its progeny need to do a lot more to enable collaborative filtering and ratings - of media and nodes, as well as groups and producers.

P2P could be so much more than efficient ''pr0n & britney'' distribution... more even than the ''universal digital library'' that first Napster and now Kazaa have promised... but it has to get much smarter before that will happen. I feel like Freenet, by tackling the much more difficult problem of anonymous p2p, has been confronting these issues for longer, and by implementing such "smarter network" features may gain a leg up on the competition (and the last shall be first)... I don't know why the commercial Gnutella folks aren't setting the pace in this area (instead of bulking up on, no kidding, their chat and music capabilities), but really, they're not.

-renard

The LimeWire/TopMoxie affiliates are listed on the LimeWire web site here.

Linking to these through the LimeWire web site goes directly to our affiliate links just like they would with any other web site. Those links are also listed directly on our home page.

Yup. Raphael Manfreti (of gtk-gnutella fame) and the Limewire team (also major GDF developers), get no credit, and these "Sharezilla" wankers get a Slashdot link.

Well, *here* is credit where credit's due:

GTK-gnutella

LimeWire

Gnutella started out as an "interesting project". It is now one of the most heavily developed an analyzed projects -- somewhat less centralized than the Freenet project, but far more skill (and variety of clients) on this than, say, FastTrack and the much-lauded Kazaa.

What may not be clear to many Slashdot readers is that the Gnutella protocol has been steadily improving over the last few months. Let me correct the previous poster on a few points:

Search results. You only get about 4-7 hops. Assuming 4 hops & 4 non-redundant connections per node, that means you are only searching about 256 nodes.

Your math is way off here. Try 7 hops with 6 connections, plus an extra factor of 100 or so from ultrapeers. That said, we are always looking for ways to improve searching. Ultrapeers were one step along that path.

Fifo queuing. You may have been requesting a file for the past 24 hours, but someone that just requested a file may get lucky, and take what should have been your spot.

Many clients (e.g., LimeWire, BearShare, Shareaza, Gtk-Gnutella) have supported this for some time now. They all interoperate too.

Bandwith Min/Max for Uploads/Downloads. A limit on the min/max speed for each file download/uploaded, and a min/max for the TOTAL of all downloads/uploads.

All decent client have features like this. But note that this is an implementation issue, not a protocol issue.

Search by hash

This has been supported for many months, thanks to Gordon Mohr's HUGE proposal.

Metadata

LimeWire has had XML-based metadata for over a year. I believe Shareaza uses the same scheme.

As these examples show, the GDF has been quite successful at driving innovation on the Gnutella network. But caution is sometimes in order; it can be hard to predict the result of thousands of clients running a new protocol. It would be good for Shareaza to submit its new extensions for peer review before rolling out thousands of clients. It is easy to build a client that gets more search results; it is harder to do that without hurting the entire network.

Christopher Rohrs
LimeWire

I run LimeWire straight from console in Linux (and Windows) using "java -jar LimeWire.jar", mainly cause I don't trust their installer to not install spyware. You can download this platform-independant .jar from their website using "LimeWireLinux.tgz" or "LimeWireWinNoVm.zip". Does this spyware exist in the .jar version, or only in the .EXE installer version? And if it is in the .jar file, does it function in Linux (I seriously doubt it)? If so, how?

On the left-hand sidebar of LimeWire.com there's a link that says "LimeWire Open Source". That links you to LimeWire.org, which has a link in the left-hand bar called "License" - which says:

GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307
USA

And so on and so forth.

That took 10 seconds of Googling, FYI.

That article is from March 2001, which is very out of date. Since then, a lot of development has occurred, most notably the development of supernodes by Limewire, gnucleus, et al. In addition, a new ping and pong scheme has been proposed.

Name 10 applications written in Java that can be bought at the store.

I believe he was talking about business systems (database clients and like ilk). Java clients have been quite successful in that area, there are tons.

Even so, I'm going to give it a shot, just for fun.

1. LimeWire
2. JBuilder
3. Poseidon for UML
4. BugSeeker
5. IDEA
6. ???
7. Profit!

Dammit, just five, and using developer tools was kind of cheating.

It's worth noting that Limewire is one of the big guns in the Gnutella world, and they're very quick to lay the blame for any perceived problems at the feet of ill behaved clients. I've been fighting with their singularly unresponsive team of developers for some time now, reporting bugs and getting zero feedback on them. Since many of these bugs are not in the open sourced Limewire engine, but in the user interface code, it's not really easy for me to diagnose the problem and fix it for them. However, as a Java developer, I see much behavior in the 2.X Limewire clients which is indicative of very bad Java programming practices.

When I noticed some severe breakage in the user interface on Mac OS X (one of Limewire's supported platforms, and a premiere Java development environment), I reported it, and much of my complaints were ascribed to other gnutella clients behaving badly on the network. While I can understand why badly behaved clients on the network would cause failed searches, I don't see how that could possibly explain mangled UI elements in the application which do not behave as expected (or as documented)! All subsequent follow-ups to the Limewire staff were never responded to, and I can only conclude that bug reports are being ignored; the last several releases of Limewire that I've checked have fixed some, but certainly not all, application problems.

The most telling experiment conducted to date was when I used version 1.7 of Limewire, which I happened to keep a copy of; it was able to complete searches faster than the version 2.X clients that have been foisted on the public, and in many cases returned results where the 2.X clients would not. The main upgrade from version 1.X to 2.X of Limewire is the inclusion of the Ultrapeer protocol support. This leads me to conclude that Limewire's Ultrapeer support is either broken, or that Ultrapeer itself is fundamentally flawed. In an attempt to make Gnutella clients better behaved, the major vendors of Gnutella software have crippled the users of that software, rendering it useless.

What's sad is, I paid money to support the development of Limewire by purchasing Limewire Pro (so I wouldn't have to watch adware). As thanks, I've received product updates from Limewire that have given me less and less functionality, and more eye-candy that results in a broken user experience. (Last time I checked, I still couldn't successfully conduct a search for music using the specifically [re]designed interface for entering parameters such as artist or track or album title. This interface would never even instantiate the search in the first place. I had to instead use the most generic method of querying the Gnutella network, based on wildcard matching to filenames.)

In summary, I believe that some of the motivation behind claims that badly behaved clients are destroying the Gnutella network is simply a cover-up for incompetently written code written by the major players. I also believe that Ultrapeer is either badly implemented or badly specced in the first place. Turning Gnutella into a closed protocol flies in the face of what it purports to be -- an open standard. And since the major Gnutella players have a vested economic interest in keeping others out of the sandbox, I'm a bit skeptical of this proposed solution. If Gnutella becomes closed off, expect to see a major splintering of the community as people seek truly open standards.

The LimeWire Basic has some adware.
http://www.limewire.com/

But there's also GPLed source code now (not very easy to compile though).
http://www.limewire.org/

./configure --disable-ads

The gnutella TTL is decremented at each servant is passes.
Some more info here:

http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/developer

LimeWire, a gnutella client, has allowed users to browse a person's shared directory in the past, but it doesn't seem to work if you're behind a firewall.

Besides, it's possible that they (the RIAA) could write or modify their own gnutella client that searches for all of the songs to appear on the Billboard Top 40 in the past five years and keep track of the IP addresses returned. If one particular IP address is sharing more than some magic number of those songs (100? 1000? 10000?), the red flag goes up and the ISP is notified.

However, I'm wondering what they're going to do in cases where individuals are at a university or organization behind a firewall, or even those individuals behind their own firewalls at home (like a LinkSys Cable Router). If my girlfriend is sharing mp3s using LimeWire on her computer, am I going to get sued because the cable service is in my name? How are they going to know it was her and not me? I just don't see how they can hope to pull this off besides sending cease & desist orders to everyone on every high-speed internet service in the U.S. or by suing people with the expectation that they'll just want to settle out of court because they can't fight the music industry.

And one last question - why are they spending all this time and money on plans to sue individuals when they should have had working, legitimate online music services years ago? If consumers could download any song they like for $.50 each and know that they were getting a good-quality encoding, there wouldn't be as much of a need to go after individual mp3 swappers. Yes, there will always be individuals who will trade mp3s and software for free, but I can think of a number of people (especially in my parents' generation who are just getting into the internet and high-speed access) who would legitimately pay for music if those services were available.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi

limewire, you moron. If you don't have any idea what you're talking about, don't talk. I started writing in java a long time ago when I found it took me a fraction of the time to debug my code than it did in C++. I don't give a shit how fast emulated code is when I'm not writing a graphics engine and I run an athlon, it dosn't make any difference at all. And you can't have the same portability with c... compiled java is 100% portible. Compiled c is 100% not portable (without emulation, but then where's the advantage?). end of argument. Go home, troll

Popular download networks such as Audiogalaxy and Limewire announce that they will offer totally free downloads of singles with absolutely no charge or restrictions. w00t w00t!

Now it does. I have it, use it and it is OK. Here is what they say on the Web site:

• Swarm downloads from multiple hosts helps you get files faster

See Web page.

Or you could just go with IRC (obligatory link for newbies) and screw all that schmansy luser "p2p" crap. :)

How many people are on GNUtella [sic] or Kazza [sic]?

• FastTrack - 1,314,066
• iMesh - 429,498
• Gnutella - 221,922
• eDonkey - 155,356
• DirectConnect - 83,464
• FileNavigator - Down
• SongSpy - 14,022
• Blubster - 5,961

However, limewire is the counterexample...it is at least adware, yet open sourced. I do believe that there are independent copies with ads removed floating around...and that is the protection given by open source.

To get an ad-disabled copy of Limewire you can go to their alternative downloads page and select "Other". This lets you download a .zip containing the JAR, which you can run if you have a JRE installed. The normal installers include a JRE, but they also include the adware and crap, so it's best to get the JRE elsewhere.

Yes, I have VPC/2 and I am running OS/2 @ home. I only need Win32 if I get an application (like tax application in Germany or a library application) I can not use with ODIN.

This happens only five times a year and for all other my wife and myself use OS/2!

Some examples:

• Communication with ADSL or/and ISDN, to FidoNet and the Internet.
• Answering machine
• Programming with jEDIT on a native Java aplication.
• Exchanging Sounds and songs with AudioGalaxy/2 or LimeWire in the GNUtella network
• Word processing, Using Spreadsheet or Layout application with Papyrus or StarOffice 5.1a.
• Web Browser like Mozilla or Opera
• ...and many, many more

My source is www.os2.org and as long as I can work with OS/2 I will do it because it is fast, rock solid and it has a nice GUI the *nix community could learn from!

I know people have experienced problems with Gnutella clients in the past but Limewire has improved dramatically over the past few months. If your willing to spend $8.50 you can get the pro version which has no bundled software and has a few additional features. You can always use the free version and run Ad Aware to get rid of the additional apps. Limewire is open source too so you can compile it yourself and remove the additional apps plus it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The 2.3 version has a bunch of new features including the ability to search by media type: audio, video, programs, etc.

I know people have experienced problems with Gnutella clients in the past but Limewire has improved dramatically over the past few months. If your willing to spend $8.50 you can get the pro version which has no bundled software and has a few additional features. You can always use the free version and run Ad Aware to get rid of the additional apps. Limewire is open source too so you can compile it yourself and remove the additional apps plus it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The 2.3 version has a bunch of new features including the ability to search by media type: audio, video, programs, etc.

Gnucleus is a FAST, open-source window$ client in a relatively stable state right now. It also works in Wine, from what I hear. It has lots of features not present in slower clients like Limewire and, being open-source, doesn't lock out other clients like BearShare does. Morpheus has switched its entire network to Gnutella on a modified Gnucleus client, so there is no longer the "lack of files" excuse for using a proprietary network instead of gnutella. If you download it, be sure to "evolve" to version 1.6.3, as the version on the site is not very stable.

Limewire is good. But don't download its Windows installer- that has spyware in it! Instead: install a JVM on your computer, then go to Limewire's page for alternate OS downloads, select "other" as your operating system, and run it using the JVM, without all the crap they bundle in. Most spyware is Windows-specific.
Yeah, it's a shame that P2P only became popular recently, in the age of the MP3. If it had been invented 10-20 years earlier, with RFCs, and had the stature of, say, FTP, people would be thinking of it as a fundamental part of the Internet. Instead we have this horrible situation, where anyone who uses a P2P client is presumed to be a freeloader or a criminal. P2P deserves better than a bunch of spyware-loaded clients that block each other's users from their own networks.

Now Morpehsu is going to try and make money off of Gnutella. Well, here's a pretty pickle. Does the Gnutella network want a for-profit service in there, attracting the ire of the MPAA and their bought politicians (and judges who, lest we forget, have an eye on promotion to the Supremes, and can tell which way the political winds are shifting)? I doubt it.

If you go to the limewire site, click on the "network size" menu option and than the "historical", you will get a nice graph of the gnutella network size. You will notice two significant increases in network size over the past few months.

Here's a direct link to the graph.

What's amazing is since you posted about 12 hours ago, the network has increased to about 280,000 clients. And climbing -- I refreshed after 5 minutes and the green bar was a couple pixels higher.

This didn't kill file sharing. And Neitzche was right -- what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Take away all the proprietary networks, please, RIAA. Throw us into that brier patch, br'er bear.

As a longtime Gnugella user, I will be happy to see Morpheus users join the network. Per Metcalfe's law, this should make our network much more valuable. The past few revisions of the Limewire client in particular have made the service much more responsive. Although the experience has not yet surpassed Napster's brightest hour, given a few more months there will be no reason for that original fileshareing service to return. The limewire folks have even opensourced their client. Now, if only half the people reading this comment could pitch in...

As a longtime Gnugella user, I will be happy to see Morpheus users join the network. Per Metcalfe's law, this should make our network much more valuable. The past few revisions of the Limewire client in particular have made the service much more responsive. Although the experience has not yet surpassed Napster's brightest hour, given a few more months there will be no reason for that original fileshareing service to return. The limewire folks have even opensourced their client. Now, if only half the people reading this comment could pitch in...

One problem with LimeWire's initial implementation is that ultrapeers didn't respond to "crawler pings" with "leaf pongs". (We've since changed that.) So as pretty as these pictures are, they're probably not accurate. I would love to see updated results that accounted for ultrapeers.

The Gnutella network is evolving rapidly, and it would be great if academic papers considered these changes. The Gnutella Developer Forum (GDF) is the primary location for protocol development.

Christopher Rohrs
Sr. Software Engineer
LimeWire

One problem with LimeWire's initial implementation is that ultrapeers didn't respond to "crawler pings" with "leaf pongs". (We've since changed that.) So as pretty as these pictures are, they're probably not accurate. I would love to see updated results that accounted for ultrapeers.

The Gnutella network is evolving rapidly, and it would be great if academic papers considered these changes. The Gnutella Developer Forum (GDF) is the primary location for protocol development.

Christopher Rohrs
Sr. Software Engineer
LimeWire

It would seem that the disgruntled users have decided to switch to gnutella. This chart shows that an increase of 400% overnight just occured . Shuting down a truly decentralized P2P network won't be so easy.

The next step is to add more sophisticated routing protocols between ultrapeers. Many of the algorithms mentioned elsewhere in this post (Chord, CAN, etc.) are contenders for that, as is LimeWire's home-grown query-routing proposal.

Christopher Rohrs
LimeWire

The next step is to add more sophisticated routing protocols between ultrapeers. Many of the algorithms mentioned elsewhere in this post (Chord, CAN, etc.) are contenders for that, as is LimeWire's home-grown query-routing proposal.

Christopher Rohrs
LimeWire

AudioGalaxy IMHO is the best free client out there . The others such as MusicCity's Morpheus, Bearshare, Limewire, and KaZaA all have been held accountable for copyright violations. You might remember the slashdot article entitled P2P vs. RIAA: RIAA Wins. Now aren't we glad that our government passed that wonderful law called The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)[pdf]?

Thinking of downloading a free share program, ever wonder how RIAA can attack you? The following was taken from their website outlining how the DMCA can be used against you and I.

"The DMCA law also delineates the responsibilities of Internet service providers (ISPs) in cases of infringement online. For example, the law formalizes a notice and takedown procedure between ISPs and copyright owners. It is now clear that when an ISP is aware it is posting or transmitting infringing content, the ISP must act to remove the infringing works or it may be liable for any resulting damages." snip

So what has RIAA been up to? The following is proof that they have been busy using their precious DMCA.

The RIAA Anti-Piracy Unit seized 1,257,796 illegal CD-Rs by midyear 2001, this is up 133% compared to midyear of 2000. Here is a link to a pdf with their mid year statistics for 2001; and then I will end my rant on RIAA because I don't want to get too offtopic :)

On Cnet they keep track of the most popular mp3 search utilities. Morpheus comes in first this week with slightly less than a million and a half downloads; it has an impressive 42 million total downloads. Remember back to the height of Napster's popularity, they had a supposed 200 million users. This number shouldn't be compared to the number of total downloads due to the possibility of users creating multiple accounts.

Also on Cnet, Napster 2.0 beta 10.4 the one that was reviewed in the article has a ghastly approval rating of 0.099. That means that less than one hundredth of the people that downloaded the new pay-for-play Napster actually liked it. Going through the user reviews of the products it appears that they find that Napster falls short of the free clients, it certainly is apparent that it does not yet have the user base that Free Nappyster enjoyed.

For the electronic junkies out there I would recommend a less well known file sharing client known as SoulSeek. You can download it not from Cnet, but from their own website. The latest version is 104 and it includes dedicated techno/electronica service with a great user base; "Private messaging capabilities with both online and off-line users; Folder based file-sharing, which allows for more convenient browsing and downloading; Fine-grained control over file-sharing, with the ability to restrict access to a select list of users, as well as the ability to disallow access to specific users; Fine-grained transfer queue management, with the ability to restrict the number of uploads and downloads per-user and in total; File searching with users in room or in user list; Wishlist that takes search patterns for easy automatic notification when certain files become shared; A generic personalized recommendation system." snip

Now that these Pier to Pier file sharing networks have taken over, they are looking for ways to make money. Maybe to pay their programmers and lawyers. Beware of the adervistements that come bundled along with the install for the more popular sharing clients, such as Audiogalaxy. These bundled programs are known as SpyWare.

-If I metamoderated myself I would care more about karma

Seriously. The latest version (2.1) seems to have solved quite a few of the problems outlines in the 'study'. Anyone who is doubting the scalability of the protocol should give it a try.

There were several responces to this article pointing out that the current Gnutella network is much more scalable than the one discussed in the article. Try looking here and here for articles discussing the changes since early 2000.

Come on Slashdot, its 2002 not 2000. It looks pretty bad accepting this article right after the Napster one. Does Slashdot or VA own a stake in Napster or something?

http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/trojan

I quote:

It has come to Lime Wire's attention over the past 24 hours that one of the bundled software installers included with LimeWire 2.0.2 for the PC is now considered a SpyWare/Trojan by various anti-virus software packages. We have received complaints from our users and we have worked quickly to resolve this issue by putting out a new beta immediately yesterday and rolling LimeWire 2.0.3 for the PC into production at 3:30PM EST today (Jan 1. Note that this did not affect LimeWire 2.0.2 P (LimeWire PRO) users.. We will be communicating further with LimeWire 2.0.2 PC users as information becomes available.

Workaround for all of this nonsense: don't download the Windows-specific version, get one of the ones without an installer (such as the Linux or Solaris versions) from here and use that instead. It removes one layer of laziness as you have to install the JRE and make the icon yourself, but it does mean that the ONLY code that LimeWire can install and execute on your system is a) visible and b) written in Java, which means it can't do anything too evil (read: anything platform-specific).

Hope this helps...

I quote:

It has come to Lime Wire's attention over the past 24 hours that one of the bundled software installers included with LimeWire 2.0.2 for the PC is now considered a SpyWare/Trojan by various anti-virus software packages. We have received complaints from our users and we have worked quickly to resolve this issue by putting out a new beta immediately yesterday and rolling LimeWire 2.0.3 for the PC into production at 3:30PM EST today (Jan 1. Note that this did not affect LimeWire 2.0.2 P (LimeWire PRO) users.. We will be communicating further with LimeWire 2.0.2 PC users as information becomes available.

Workaround for all of this nonsense: don't download the Windows-specific version, get one of the ones without an installer (such as the Linux or Solaris versions) from here and use that instead. It removes one layer of laziness as you have to install the JRE and make the icon yourself, but it does mean that the ONLY code that LimeWire can install and execute on your system is a) visible and b) written in Java, which means it can't do anything too evil (read: anything platform-specific).

Hope this helps...

Limewire 2.0 is out already.

Christopher mentions three domains which have bandwidth costs of $10,000/mo. Seems to me like this is a good time to start mirrors of www.limewire.com and www.limewire.org. Not sure how router.limewire.com is used (I haven't read up on the Gnutella network's behavior), but couldn't that be distributed as well?

I'd recommend Limewire as a gnutella client.

It's a java based client, so the interface is a bit clunky, but last time I tried it, it did better than any other client I tried at searching for stuff you want. (That was about a year ago though)

And last I heard, Limewire was made opensource, so you can feel nice and warm and pleasant inside whilst your enlargening your pron collection.

on a side note:

my school has essentially blocked all of the popular p2p clients. even limewire.

in the back of my head, i always knew that having a subscription to a national dialup isp was a good idea.

I use Gnutella by way of LimeWire and it works great for me. I frequently have thousands of hosts and over 10 TB of files to search. My only complaint is that I haven't found a Gnutella servent with strong advanced searching capability (i.e. use of AND, OR, NOT operators). Or if they do it wasn't in the documentation. :)

I think you're confusing the language spec with the JDK spec. Could you post a link to the page to which you're referring? JDK 1.02 didn't include JNI, but gcj does, for instance. I don't think gcj is a full JDK 1.1 implementation, but it's close and getting closer all the time.

And Gnu is still calling it gcj so I guess I can too.

I thought I covered that, but thanks very much for pointing it out...again. ;-)

I base it on personal experience, I code java full time mostly server side but occasionally gui as well, and as yet I have never seen any java based gui app perform to a resonable degree.

Really? You don't think jEdit or LimeWire perform adequately? Regardless, Java games will generally not be GUI apps. They will be 2D or 3D graphics apps with custom user interfaces.

Swing is a heavy and inefficient library in current implementations (supposedly better in 1.4) but Java games don't need it. That is why gcj is an option even though it doesn't have AWT or Swing. BTW, what is your rationale against games developed with gcj? I see no reason why they would be slower than OO C++.

As far as Arkanae goes, it looks interesting but I will reserve judgement until I get a chance to play.

It's far from complete, but it is Open Source. Fun stuff!

If you'd care to continue this in e-mail, use glock27sd@yahoo.com. Thanks!

299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

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Actually, I know of at least one reason cheap, high-bandwidth services should be in demand: Gnutella. I started using LimeWire this weekend. It's really sweet, very nice GUI. Judging from the blinky lights on my cable modem, there's a lot of other people who like it (Gnutella) too. I recommended my sister download and install it (she's at the U. of Arizona), need to check up and see how that went (she is not computer-inclined; she can barely get USB devices to work). College students will *not* be giving up their MP3s. Not if there's even a halfway decent solution out there.

I do not dispute that shipping kitty litter across country is a bad idea, though, just that there are no uses for all that bandwidth.

Regards,

Stephen

Java is so slow.

Yet no one here ever complains about the slowness of PHP, Python, bash, etc. -- scripting languages that are almost by definition slower than Java in most circumstances. Why does the speed complaint only get leveled against Java?

The point is that, much like PHP, Java is plenty fast enough for what people use it for. I use it for web application development, and the performance is more that just acceptable. It's lightning fast. I think this perception is fostered by the ancient JVMs that ship with Windows and IE, which are major releases behind the current state of the art.

No one uses Java for GUI app development.

LimeWire, which IMHO is the best Gnutella client out there, is pure Java. It's very responsive, feature rich, stable, and less than 1MB, about the same size as XMMS. Hardly what you'd call slow bloatware, which is the usual complaint.

Sun owns Java. Java isn't free.

I could mention Tomcat, which is open source and which we use in production where I work. But then someone could complain that the JVM we're running it on is still proprietary to Sun...

Haven't any of you heard of Kaffe, GCJ, or GNU CLASSPATH? None of these things are what I would consider production-grade yet, but the point is, Java is only as closed as people want it to be. If you don't like the fact that the best JVMs are all proprietary, then by all means, contribute to one of the many free Java projects out there!

Get past the myths. Java won't solve every programming problem, but if you don't like it, at least complain about the parts that *do* suck (like java.io.* :)

Q