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Gnutella Creator Releases New Free Software
Compenguin writes: "Justin of Nullsoft released three new pieces of free (as in speech and in beer) software, an installer, a pinger/grapher, and a throttlable file copier. They all use the zlib license. The source is available now, marking the first time nullsoft has actually released source to their "Open Source" products *Cough*Gnutella*Cough*."
This is a slightly useful network monitor graphing thing for Win32. It just sits in its own window, pinging a host, and giving you a graph of how long it takes each time.
How useful, now we can have more lamers transmitting unnessecary traffic so they can have a little graph show up. Just another reason to drop all incoming icmp.
Working at a company where I have suggested Open Sourcing tools we use and been met with blank stares by superiors I understand his situation.
Unfortunately Justin works for Nullsoft which is owned by AOL which in turn is part of TimeWarner which is a member of the RIAA. It is simply impossible for AOL to let Nullsoft release the source for Gnutella. Considering that Justin probably signed standard industry paperwork when he signed at with AOL , it is very likely that AOL owns the code to Gnutella and decides what gets done to it.
Unless Justin wants an intense legal battle with a corporation with more money and lawyers than you can shake a stick at, he unfortunately has to give in to their demands. Before anyone chides for this "How many of you would risk losing your job and getting involved in an expensive legal battle simply to release source code to a program that can be reverse engineered by any enterprising hacker?"
Surely this isn't really big news? Some guy has written some free software for windows, it's not even especially interesting software.
This looks like a job for freshmeat?
I've noticed some people saying that this isn't a big deal. After all we have tons of open source software for linux. The big difference is that Win32 has been a bastion of shareware, and closed-source freeware with very little open source software. The last program I compiled from source on Win32 was NotifyCD, released in 1998. It's not a common occurance, and it's rarely as high profile as this. After all, Winamp is arguably one of the most popular pieces of software ever, and for them to publically release Windows source is a big deal because it sets the stage for others to do the same.
Also, lest we forget, the installed base of Windows is much bigger, yet there is little free open source software for it, so this will get to a great deal more people.
----------------- "I have a bone to pick, and a few to break." - Refused -------------------
Automatically skips or overwrites existing files
Alright! just what I've been looking for, no more "Do you wish to overwrite this file?" pop-ups! WOOHOO!