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The huge innovation is that it actually works, even for typical users who don't know the difference between UPnP, UDP, UPS and UFC. All those funky tricks developed for P2P, like TCP connection reversal and UDP hole punching, can be used for friend-to-friend connections too.

Didja know LimeWire is open source, GPL'd?

See http://limewire.org/ .

It's licenced under the GNU GPL. From their website:

I think that's the relevant section, but I'm not lawyer-shaped...

I'm amazed anyone is still using the Gnutella network. Have there been any improvements to it recently? Last I used it, probably 5 years ago, it was awfully slow.

Things have changed a lot in the last 5 years. A few spammy clients were causing a huge amount of traffic by periodically rebroadcasting unsuccessful searches, so the developers of various clients got together and redesigned the protocol to reduce search overhead, leaving more bandwidth for file transfers.

Recent versions of LimeWire also support the BitTorrent protocol, so you can have your cake and eat it too: decentralised search, a huge library of rare files, and fast downloads for popular files.

Plus, it really only deals with the Gnutella network, whereas most of the traffic nowadays would probably be using Bittorrent.

LimeWire is already open source.

Limewire is allready open source, you can download it right here: http://www.limewire.org/limewire.zip . The community site for it is http://limewire.org/ . So therefor, if limewire gets sued, there is still frostwire http://frostwire.org/ which is a fork of limewire, and provides same functionality. Frostwire isn't run by an organization so it would be pretty hard to sue.

Limewire is allready open source, you can download it right here: http://www.limewire.org/limewire.zip . The community site for it is http://limewire.org/ . So therefor, if limewire gets sued, there is still frostwire http://frostwire.org/ which is a fork of limewire, and provides same functionality. Frostwire isn't run by an organization so it would be pretty hard to sue.

You could always do a code bounty.

Parent suffers brain damage. LimeWire is GPL'd software.

More importantly, Limewire is Open Source! If you don't like the new restrictions, just set "Is_Licensed = 1;" If past performance is any indication, within hours of this change we will see a "Limewire Lite" that is completley DRM free.

So people can go to other networks, or can go to other clients on the same network, or can just tweak the client. This seems a bit silly. The only thing I can see this doing is driving people from the official LimeWire client to unofficial ones, ensuring that the people who make the client will be getting even less money.

Umm Limewire itself is open source (GPL http://www.limewire.org/gnu.shtml) and as well as that it runs on the Gnutella protocol which is also open source. The fact that Limewire has a company behind it than can be the target of lawsuits is irrelevant. If they get sued out of business or put too many restrictions on it the project will just be forked by the community and they'll be in the same boat as eMule and Bittorrent.

So, its license is not considered "open source"?

I don't know how they plan on doing this...considering Limewire is released under the GPL.

From /usr/lib/LimeWire/SOURCE on my Linux machine:

-------------

The LimeWire source code can be obtained from the LimeWire open source
development site at www.limewire.org. The source code can be easily
accessed at: http://gui.limewire.org/servlets/ProjectSource.

Thank you for your interest in LimeWire!

-LimeWire Team

-----------

The COPYING file in the same directory contains a copy of the GNU GPL v 2.

So, considering Limewire LLC doesn't own the copyrights to all of the work in the program, they cannot change the license terms on the other code. What is preventing a fork that still allows copyrighted material to be downloaded???

Limewire was forked once before http://www.zeropaid.com/news/923/Release:+FreeWire +2.4.0+out+now! so it can always happen again.

I think this is Limewire LLC's way of removing their own liability, even though they know Limewire will now get forked. I don't really blame them either.

Limewire pro already pops up a message saying it can't determine if a file is licensed or not and if you still want to download. Click yes and the checkbox that says "always use this answer" and you'll never see it again.

Also here's the source. Go build your own without this 'feature'.

Congradulations! You've just reinvented a hash-based filesharing network. You're not the first, though:

* Gnutella (BASE32 SHA1)
* eDonkey/Overnet (Tiger Tree Hash)
* KaZaA (KZHash)
* Freenet (CHK)
* Mnet (?)

Mnet even does the full .torrent block hashing thing. Most of these networks deploy swarming, too.

The coolest thing is magnet-uri's. I've even written a redirector for SHA1 links here.

There is no adware/spyware in LimeWire. It's also open-source so you can check for yourself - note the .org and not the .com

I don't know where you got your info from, but it's false.

Bob

Err, downloading the LimeWire source is trivially easy. From the front page of limewire.org:

# Use CVS, with:
cvs -d:pserver:guest@cvs.limewire.org:/cvs login

cvs -d:pserver:guest@cvs.limewire.org:/cvs checkout core gui lib tests.

No adware in LimeWire, either, if you know what you're doing with it.

I prefer shareaza though -- the user interface is much nicer and it has some useful features that limewire lacks.

The initial version of LionShare used the LimeWire open source codebase. Good to see open code and open networks being used to build new applications....

I know it was a joke, but FYI, work is being done to make Limewire work with JDK 1.4.x. Because of the major difeferences between the MRJ and the JDK, there has been a lot of changes, to the OS X specific code.

I am not sure if the latest release version supports JDK 1.4.x, but last time I looked ( a few months ago) there was still a separate branch in cvs for the new changes. For more info, see the Limewire development site.

You can always use the LimeWire core and build something ontop of it that automates exactly what you want it to do.

Check out:
limewire.org and the javadocs.

You can always use the LimeWire core and build something ontop of it that automates exactly what you want it to do.

Check out:
limewire.org and the javadocs.

Aha, you're right about Kazaa - the GNUtella client Limewire is in Java, not Kazaa.

But of course there are countless other client-side apps, notably the free ones. I'm sure you can do the comparisons with the numbers of Mono / C Sharp applications on Sourceforge for yourself.

I'm afraid I've no idea what point you are trying to make regarding SWT. Is there something wrong with being a wrapper per se? If so, does the same criticism apply to GTK# for C Sharp?

some of us have trouble affording musical equipment and a computer, let alone a server to host high volume traffic. YES have mp3s on your site but once ten or eleven people have downloaded it, allow for that to be put on the Gnutella/etc networks - this means that people can search gnutella FIRST, so that if the songs are on gnutella, you don't have to waste your bandwidth uploading it to them. not to mention not all places in the world have highspeed access[or the rights to host servers, especially high volume ones!] I myself just got off of dialup, about a month ago. imagine trying to upload 10 10 MB Mp3 files on a 14.4...bottleneck anyone?

OK, I was wrong, Limewire is under GPL. (Not that you could tell, looking at limewire.com -- but limewire.org reveals all.) Somebody else posted about something called DVArchive, something for fooling with your ReplayTV. Moneydance was announced recently, and might get popular. Anything else?

limewire is free software, if you want it to be. it's open-source. download and see for yourself. or here's the javadocs, if you're so inclined.

limewire is free software, if you want it to be. it's open-source. download and see for yourself. or here's the javadocs, if you're so inclined.

I guess you haven't tried the CVS version of Limewire.

limewire is great for finding books to download. You can automatically filter for documents (ps,pdf,doc...) although i find alot of the best computer related books are in zip format. I got a huge zip file (50MB) downloaded ages ago that basically was the whole o'reilly series on java.

right now i'm sharing a giant zip file called AllDocsSubscription.zip which is the full documentation (up to 3.03) for the open source jboss project and would normaly cost a pretty penny. also available here

If you want to look at and change the Limewire code, then you can visit their open source development site

what's worse? copying information that may or may not contain an encrypted file that can be decrypted through hardware/software to listen to music, enriching your life while making no one's life any worse OR paying money to a system that systematically rapes artists of their life works, not to mention leaves them at the side of a highway later on with nothing to keep them alive? where are all your one hit wonders? gone! i consider it a sin to give the RIAA Any money whatsoever. if you have to do it, you have to do it...but it doesn't make you a good person if you do it and it DEFINITELY does not make you a bad person if you don't. STOP STEALING MUSIC FROM ARTISTS -- USE GNUTELLA AND KEEP MUSIC FREE. this THE only ethical choice.

"and a fair renumeration to the artists involved. "
as an artist i'm frankly offended. why should anyone pay an artist for anything? the entire point of being an artist is to create art!! to make the world a better more beautiful place!! the entire point of an artist is _not_ to make money. if you want to make money, go take up prostitution because what we do not need in this world is yet another -i-wanna-be-a-rock-and-roll-star-so-i-can-rip-off- millions-of-teenage-girls-parents-and-get-rich. I'm sick of this kind of thinking, and these kind of artists. sure, once in awhile one of these corporate rock stars ends up being a real talent, but the fact is that the *AA has vested interests in keeping the good music to themselves, and giving us the music 'that sells. the whole concept of having money in any way related to music is corrupt, and napster/gnutella helped to begin to rid the world of its influence by creating a society of people who can trade music for free. oh wait! now we can have a world where you don't have to pay for music any more, and that as an artist you can have exposure to BILLIONS of potential fans. i don't know or care about you but if i had a billion people in the world who had heard and had their life improved by hearing one of my songs, i would die a happy man...even if i hadn't made a single cent.

take for example, DJ Schnits-'i am not canadian.mp3'...taken as a satyr of some sorts of the Molson Canadian 'I AM Canadian' rant---i found people in places from Singapore to the UK who had all heard and were amused by his mp3. and i don't think he ever made any money off of that...THIS is what artists should be striving for, if anything. not money.

Well, many people use Limewire. Portable and stable; available on any platform JDK1.3 is (which means at least Linux, Windows and MacOS).

I've been playing around with the limewire source for ahwile, it is well documented and there is no spyware in the open source version. I love how people complain about Limewire and spyware, when it is open source. Anyone can take the gpled limewire source and package it without spyware without having to reverse engineer it like closed source KaZaa.

Well I assume if your posting on /. you are familiar with CVS? Go to this page and grab a copy of the source. All you need to compile is the java sdk and the ant build tool.

It may also be good to mention that CHORD is being developed by Limewire here. A release is being expected any day now... should be pretty soon, as they've released their spec for GUESS in the GDF, which is a global search method.

With GUESS and CHORD, perhaps Gnutella can finally stand up to FastTrack, WinMX etc.

It may also be good to mention that CHORD is being developed by Limewire here. A release is being expected any day now... should be pretty soon, as they've released their spec for GUESS in the GDF, which is a global search method.

With GUESS and CHORD, perhaps Gnutella can finally stand up to FastTrack, WinMX etc.

LimeWire is open source.

See their website for more information.

Next time, look yourself. You could have found that in the time it took you to post to Slashdot. (Go to limewire.com. Click on "Limewire Open Source". Click on "License".) People will like you more if you aren't pathetically lazy.

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.

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.

One tip though, if you are trying to run the latest CVS version in linux, edit the gui/run file and change all the semicolons to colons in order for limewire to run on Linux.

Limewire and Jedit are two very nice programs that are GPLed. The programs run pretty fast and run on most popular platforms (being Java). Pretty cool when your P2P software has the same interface on Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Having the same interface makes answering your families' questions rather easy.

The latest versions of limewire use hashes from a specification called HUGE that probably defeat this type of posioning attack. You can check out a recent interview with limewire team here. Go here if you want to download the code or check out the dev docs(Which are pretty outdated).

Java on the client is far from dead, there are a few programs keeping it alive namely Yahoo Games and Limewire. Any standalone app that wants to use java can either bundle the JVM on the dload/CD or provide a link to the download site. Its also much more bearable today thanks to improvements and moore's law. I think one of the big problems is people have a bad impression of java due to the earlier releases where you would wait 5 mins for a god damn applet to load.

Limewire has been GPL'd. ;http://www.limewire.org/. I really doubt that there is anything in that code that the other Gnute programmers aren't already aware of.

Vincent Falco has been arguing these points about XoloX and a few others for a long time now, and frankly, I see it just as his own method of trying to lock out the better clients. So go ahead, and hope for this to happen. Use your spyware/Trojan-ridden Bearshare program. Vince will surely be happy.

You are dealing with a decentralized, open protocol. Locking others out is silly. Vince should write his own P2P protocol instead.

If you are having problems with your connection, then perhaps you should stop trying to get files over a frickin' dialup modem.

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/

... I have yet to see a Java app that is worth my time.

I won't even get into to how great Tomcat and other server-side java technology is for developers, but I will mention a few client-side java apps:
Jedit - The fabulous text/code editor.
Robocode - Learn to program! Play a cool game! Same thing!
LimeWire - Everyone loves P2P! Share the love.
Runescape - An MMORPG that runs on Linux and Mac (besides Windows) thanks to java? Hell Yeah!

Go back to browsing msn.com you mindless XP automaton! Not everyone creams at the sight of another buggy MFC shareware app.

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.