AOL Snuffs Napster-Workalike Gnutella

K2 (and many others -- Thanks!) wrote with news about Gnutella: "Just when open-sourcing was becoming mainstream, they pull the plug on it. I just read this on Wired: Open-Source 'Napster' Shut Down. If anybody got the download yesterday, could you make it available somewhere? (That must be legal based on the licensing it was given away under.) Thanks." According to this article, Gnutella was "an unauthorized freelance project and the Web site that allowed access to the software has been taken down." Note also the media companies linked to AOL (Warner and EMI).Update: 03/16 03:01 by H :Check out our original story about it.

Comments

Re:Slashdot warez kiddies

[Danse]

Actually, most of the stuff they play on the radio is crap. Maybe it's just because we don't have any good stations in the city I live in, or maybe it's just that radio stations in general play mostly crappy music. I'm not sure which it is. Anyway, I've bought several cds lately after downloading some mp3s from mp3.com and from listening to some illegal mp3s (which are now legal for me to have since I own the cds now). A few of the bands I probably would never have heard of if they weren't distributing their music as mp3s. The record industry is the real leech here. Their services will soon not be required and they're not happy about it. They want to cut off all other forms of distribution to keep their business model intact. I, for one, don't want to see that happen. I hope that we can soon come up with a good way of giving our money directly to the artists rather than 95% of it going to middlemen that are needed less every day.

List of servers

[eht]

since most of the rest of the artcles concern themselves with other stuff I thought I'd put up some servers

172.16.31.193:6346
147.46.115.125:6346
134.117.89.229:6346
128.220.5.205:6346
193.123.241.240:6346
132.208.210.137:6346
149.75.17.149:6346
192.0.0.4:6346
24.112.143.109:6346
172.24.16.219:6346
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9.37.194.240:6346
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208.21.4.182:6346
129.123.1.80:6346
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169.233.15.146:80
193.166.141.13:80
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38.31.45.22:23
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129.21.139.134:6346
208.239.114.4:6346
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157.142.98.93:23
193.2.132.13:6346
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24.31.196.123:6346
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166.82.44.41:6346
146.186.211.218:6346
128.143.136.75:6346
63.195.117.90:6346
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129.21.110.135:6346
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208.177.195.70:6346
216.240.164.201:6346
24.68.132.108:6346
128.193.141.27:6346
155.245.240.117:6346
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63.195.179.226:6346
130.83.18.116:6346
170.94.200.70:6346
212.17.127.69:6346
129.241.122.166:6346
63.23.113.221:6346
129.186.208.28:6346
208.225.27.59:6346
195.122.4.200:6346
212.204.129.245:6346
212.90.70.28:6346
131.212.82.76:6346
35.10.131.14:6346
141.44.23.87:6346
208.170.187.161:6346
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209.42.196.19:6346
136.183.29.151:6346
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128.82.5.39:6346
63.248.2.129:6346
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24.9.229.209:6346
146.186.231.161:6346
130.241.181.206:7999
24.93.24.97:6346

Re:Slashdot warez kiddies

[elflord]

It will become very difficult to make money in the future on the distribution of creative work...as the distribution of information is no longer a value-added process; instead, it is an AUTOMATIC process.

The fact that distributing creative work is cheap does not justify attempts to circumvent paying the artists.

Instead of making money from recordings, musicians will make their money from touring and promotions.

What if they don't want to tour ? Shouldn't they be payed whether they tour or not ?

The hundreds of companies making money by leeching funds from creative artists for the service of distribution of the artists' work will go out of business,

Personally, I'd like to see this happen. As the cost of distribution gos down, it will become easier for artists to distribute themselves without signing their souls away to a distributor.

Slashdot warez kiddies

[elflord]

I'm positively dissappointed to see slashdot becoming a haven for warez kiddies and cheapskates. I guess it's an inevitable fact that a "gift culture" will always be met with a "leech culture". We all know what this software is for. It's greet for advocates of pirated software and illegiemate music distribution. Sure, you can try to rationalise it by saying "the big evil corporations get all the money and the artist doesn't get any". If you really mean this, go buy some shareware fonts or something -- there are means of distribution that enable the artist to get compensation without a middleman intercepting all of the profits. However, piracy is not one of them. The only people who benefit from piracy are the cheapskates who do the illegal copying.

Re:Slashdot warez kiddies

[Jeff Knox]

Excuse me. You are just as bad as the people at the record labels and RIAA that bash on the format MP3 it self. No one said anything about downloading pirated mp3s. And if you think thats all Napster and Gnutella can be used for, you are simply wrong. Thats like blaming CuteFTP for all the warez downloading going on, because they provide an ftp client. Dont blame the format or the tools.

Re:Slashdot warez kiddies

[Wah]

Number of CDs Wah has bought over the last year because of legally sanctioned radio air-play : 0

Number of CDs Wah has bought over the last year because of "illegally" shared MP3s : 5

Who's benefitting now? Your brain needs another washing, that first one left quite a bit of debris.


--
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.

Re:Slashdot warez kiddies

[MattTC]

That's an easy enough position to take, but progress can't be halted.

The fact is, electronic communication is making the commoditization of information obsolete. It will become very difficult to make money in the future on the distribution of creative work...as the distribution of information is no longer a value-added process; instead, it is an AUTOMATIC process.

The only way to keep information out of someone's hands will be to keep it a secret, which would negate the point of the creative work.

This can be a boon, and it can be a problem, but it WILL happen; given the direction of computer internetworking, it is inevitible.

New business models for musicians and other artists creating informational work will have to be formed.

Musicians, for instance, will be able to use the self-publishing capabilities of the net to increase their visibility without having to go through the interference of the record companies. Instead of making money from recordings, musicians will make their money from touring and promotions.

The hundreds of companies making money by leeching funds from creative artists for the service of distribution of the artists' work will go out of business, unless they get their heads out of the sand, and change their business model to perform a real service for both consumer and artist.

In short: Non-secret information will be free, and you might as well get used to the idea, because the consequences are vast.

I couldn't disagree more

[kanaka]

Anti-Censorship tools are by their nature used to do things that are illegal. Sometimes you have to consider whether the laws that make something illegal make sense. The average dictator (if there is an average) uses censorship tools to silence both good things and bad. Pornography, hate speak, and crime are much less of a problem in totalitarian societies but free-press, free-religion, free-speech, and other freedoms are snuffed out. The freedom sword is always double edged; it always allows more good and more bad. You are right that Gnutella would allow all kinds of information to be spread across the internet. If you think that is only bad then you better think again about why the Internet has had and will have such great potential.

You probably don't own software you write.

[jetson123]

The fact that AOL could pull Gnutella should serve as an important reminder to many people: you probably don't own the software you write.

In the US, whether you work for a large corporation, for a small corporation, or whether you are a student at a university, whether you develop software in your "spare time" or during work hours, most likely, any work you do probably belongs to your employer or your school according to your contract with your employer. The only common exceptions to this are if your employer simply isn't at all in the computer field (and which employer these days isn't?) or if you are a freelancer or consultant.

This also raises interesting questions about what happens if an employee or student releases software under the GPL but it later turns out that they didn't own the software in the first place because of their employment contract. I suspect that the actual owner's rights would take precedence in that case and the GPL license would be void. In fact, that's probably the case with Gnutella. And if you put a lot of the GPL'ed software that is out there under a legal microscope, you'd probably find that a lot of it is actually owned by some university or company.

Re:Kinda figured

[Desert Raven]

I wonder if Justin noticed that little sucking sound as his soul left his body when AOL (aka, the Devil) gave him all that money. Did they make him sign in blood?

It was pretty naive of him to expect that a mega-company like AOL was going to let him continue to develop whatever he wanted to without getting it cleared through their legal machine.

One of the more interesting points is that he may not have had the right to release anything under the GPL. Very likely, anything he produces from here on in belongs to AOL, and therefore any licensing terms would have to be approved by them.

Some thoughts

[CrayDrygu]

My immediate reaction, which I see someone else has also posted, was "What right does AOL have to say what Frankel can and can't work on in his off time?"

Well, I don't know what kind of deal he signed with AOL, but there may very well be some sort of clause in there restricting this sort of thing. Now, Frankel is a smart guy. He probably wouldn't have accepted the deal if there was something horribly restrictive in there. But the issue here may be more subtle.

Even if there's no legal issue in terms of his contract with AOL, there is the fact that he's closely related to AOL->Time/Warner->Music Industry, and having someone in this family tree writing software that goes against the Family would not be a Good Thing. Anybody else writing a Gnutella-type program would probably be subject to the same kind of treatment.

Another thought is, of course, related to the nature of open source. I don't know if source was released yesterday or not with this program, I didn't have time to check out the site. If it was, though, someone else can easily continue this project. Seems kind of odd for me to say after my above comment, but you have to admit that this program has a better chance of survival outside of The Family, no?

Frankly, this is a piece of software that i want to see out there. I'm reminded of hotline, only better...which makes me think, how come nobody's filed lawsuits over hotline? Was it just timing?

Finally, just to make sure my position is clear, AOL is sucks.

Move it ouside of Nullsoft!

[mikeylebeau]

I can honestly say that while it sucks I do think AOL does have the right to stop Gnutella from being worked on at Nullsoft if they want to. That they have.

However, I still think it's a great project, so why don't the Nullsoft guys work on it in their own time? At least release the source on their own time and their own equipment and let the world do with it what they will. At least that way such a cool prog isn't dead.

Any legal buffs out there know whether even though the current state of Gnutella's been killed off by AOL, if work could still legally be done on it by the Nullsoft boys outside of Nullsoft itself?

If so I say go for it, dammit! Even releasing the source for the latest (stable) version they've made would be a huge step forward because others would come forward and work on it and make it what we all want it to be.

Salon Article on this

[Erskin]

There's a Salon Technology Log article on this.

--

Re:A nice thing to say but...

[Spud Zeppelin]

If everyone did as you suggested, not only would the execs not understand what was going on, they would just hire new people who know less at a lower salary. Then they would pat themselves on the back for a good cost cutting measure.

That's all well and good -- right up until the point where something breaks...! When you're the world's largest ISP, and one of your key systems goes down, you trust that you have a sysadmin who can "take care of it." When the most skilled sysadmin you have left is the kid you hired away from a tech support gig at Brent's Internet Service and Tree-Trimming of Dothan, Alabama, then all of a sudden that $50,000 a year less you were paying him than his predecessor begins to look like chump change, and he'll be as overwhelmed as a Radio Flyer on the receiving end of a front-end loader.

Personally, I wouldn't work in any situation where my free-time-dev rights were restricted either -- and because of that, I slammed the door in the face of one of the nation's largest consulting firms last summer when they tried to get me to sign one. Anyone who doesn't understand why needs to visit Evan Brown's website. But in this case, I suspect that in return for the 10^7 or so dollars they paid him, Justin probably did sign away a lot of his rights; assuming a large chunk of it was in stock, he has a strong interest in "protecting" Time-Warner's IP as well -- in fact if he is in fact a "corporate officer" of AOL/TW, then he has a fiduciary responsibility to AOL/TW's shareholders which he is already theoretically in breach of for having released gnutella in the first place! Ouch!



This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.

Lucky guess...

[Wah]

..eh, but who's surprised.

"Justin and Tom work for Nullsoft, makers of Winamp and Shoutcast. See? AOL *CAN* bring you good things!," the Gnutella site said yesterday.

MWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

--
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.
ba-bu-ba-ba-baaa, da-da-dum. Re-boot the ser-ver.

Kinda figured

[Spazmoid]

AOL and Time Warner lobbied so hard for the DCMA even before they were bed fellows I figured that gNutella wouldn't last long. Guess Justin is learning his lesson for sleeping with such monolopy. I bet he is pissed, but he should have seen it coming.

Wonder what AOL will do with him now, I do not know the contractural aggrements made when Nullsoft was acquired by AOL, but I bet the relationship between the Giant and the gnat is getting kindof strained.

Re:Before we jump....

[aliastnb]

What right does AOL have to stop these people from writing software on thier own time? I'm not a software writing kind of guy but is this even legal?

Quite a lot of rights, actually. As a student at a university, I have had to sign away my rights to any software I might develop, whether using my own equipment at home, or the computers in uni. This means that if I were to write (say) a napster clone, and start distributing it without using any of their resources, they would still be within their rights to tell me to withdraw it. (Incidentally, this particular uni doesn't block Napster, butit could...). I'm guessing that it would be rather silly for AOL not to impose the same restrictions on its employees- what if they developed a new MP3 player that was better than WinAmp? AOL's market in that particular sector could take quite a tumble.

In short, it's probably perfectly legal, even if it is wrong.

--

Gnutella info

[jonathan_ingram]

Firstly, there are some links to the software in the other article on /. about Gnutella.

Those links have been superceded by this page, which seems to be a combined news and FAQ page. Note that the newest version of Gnutella, .491, has problems, so using .49 or .48 is a good idea (I'm using .48 at the moment). The page also shows some IP addresses to connect to to get you started, now that the main server is down.

Gnutella also has a very active EFNet channel (#gnutella, surprisingly enough). Come on over :).

gnutella.com is down, but this project isn't dead

[zbuffered]

http://www.allskin.com/gnutella/ ...it simply moved. I think AOL's going to get snippety with Nullsoft pretty soon. Let's get Justin Frankel lined up for a /. interview! We could all gain some insight there.

Mirror for program

[wholesomegrits]

I've made the program available here: http://zonedefense.dhs.org/gnutuilla_dl. html