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The Gnutella Paradox
bemis writes "Red Herring is running an article about Gnutella and how its success may ultimately cripple it ... also covers the background for the uninitiated (like much of the 'management-types' that read RedHerring) of Gnutella, and Nullsoft itself." The article covers a lot of ground and is worth a read.
The problem is that gnutella is very stoppable if no one wants to use it. Everybody is scrambling right now to find a replacement for Napster. Something that everyone can flock to the day Napster is shut down in court. All the college kids who are competent with windows but just aren't interested in going further with their computers. The majority of people who use Napster now have probably never heard of gnutella, and probably wouldn't be bothered to set it up. (Huh? I don't get it...it doesn't connect automatically! Forget it...)
I honestly thought the problem with gnutella was bandwidth...it just wouldn't work well on 56k. Well, I just had my cable modem installed, and i went to gnutella...and it's still no good. I got 10 connections going and put in a search for metallica(someone has to have metallica, right?). Five minutes later, *nothing*. It's all well and good that it's an experiment, but Napster may not have much time left, and 90% of Napster users aren't gonna mess around with something that isn't completely working yet. (OK, Napster is in beta right now, but i question their versioning scheme.) And worst of all, gnutella isn't visibly improving...it should be open source, with a CVS, and should have new versions coming out all the time, *fixing* the problems that people complain about instead of just being some mystery.
If you're designing a distributed searchable peer-to-peer file sharing system, and you want it to change the world, you need to make it appeal to the people who don't care about the philosophy behind it, and just want it to work. I had high hopes for gnutella, but the bottom line is, when i want to find a song, I go to napster. It's just easier that way.
--b.
hot foreign sheep.
Isn't it obvious that the best benefit of using something like Gnutella is the possibility of setting up "private" Gnutella nets?
Not really, IMHO. The good thing about file sharing systems is that you can join and immediately start becoming a member, sharing and getting something back. Private networks involve a lot of 'manual' human interaction, getting to know people in chats, via email etc. to develop trust and (personal) connection. That time is something not everyone is willing to invest.
Whoa! Critical mass? Threatening? Target?
This sounds more like a plan to build a thermonuclear device with intent to obliterate the RIAA. Geeze, if this article isn't stealthily inflammatory, I don't know what is.Good thing it's not us on the wrong side of the cannon, though.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
No, its not a bad analogy, /.ers just don't understand that ripping off a company just because they think the company is ripping off the artist (meaning the artists is getting ripped off twice) should be common pracitice, cause like infermation wuntz 2 B free.
:)
I know artists on both sides of the fence. Some are great musicians, but horrid horrid businessmen. These folks need the traditional distribution schemes...their music would never be heard if it were not for big media companies. I know other folks that deal with their music online, started their own lables and make most of their money from touring and selling their discs on tour. An $8 disc bought from these guys have a hell of a lot more profit potential for these guys than the $16 discs you'll buy from Best Buy (heh...I haven't bought anything in a record store in over a year so I don't really know if this is the correct pricing). Then again, there are artists like myself that could care less about the whole money aspect of music as we have great day jobs that allow for the fact that our music is so far from the commerical aspect that we don't even worry if we will ever sell anything
The fact is it is not our right to say how someone elses wants their art distributed. If you don't like paying the price for the RIAA crap, just don't listen to it.
clif
But all the traffic has put a strain on Gnutella, and the program's weaknesses are starting to show. Mr. Kan, ever the upbeat evangelist for the technology, cheerfully admits that Gnutella has had its faults, but he also believes that Gnutella is ready for widespread use. "At first you focus on building the car, and once the car is built then you focus on refining the car," he enthuses. "We knew the refining was around the corner and it just takes some time. We wanted to accelerate the best we could by coördinating developer efforts and encouraging them to raise the bar on usability. And it happened."
No, engineers actually plan, build and test the car before it ever gets to the customer. Real software engineering (that deserves the name) is similar. Gnutella obviously wasn't thoroughly planned, which is okay, because you don't have to pay for it. But now that everyone knows that a file-sharing system can really work, the protocol should be redesigned by people who really know about what huge distributed file sharing systems need to be scalable. The 'official' Gnutella client should get all the features that the good third-party clones have, like limiatation for bandwidth and number of connections. Obviously unnecessary queries (like 'a.asf' or '*.mp3') should be dropped.
Check out Etree. This is a loose group of people that legitimately trade live concert recordings compressed with Shorten (lossless compression). They use FTP. People setup FTP servers and then announce to a mailing list what they have available.
The problem is that all of the public servers are staggering under the load. They limit the number of concurrent connections betwen 2-5 users to prevent complete mayhem on their bandwidth. So many people are trying to get in that the servers have scripts that automatically route ban anyone that attempts to connect more often than once a minute (or even two minutes for the bigger servers). The files are so large (350 megs per CD, 1-3 CD's per show usually) that it takes forever to get in. Standard Operating Procedure for downloading from public Etree servers is to open 12 terminal windows, each with a script trying to login to 12 different sites (once per minute, of course). After a few days you might get into one or two of them.
Hotline is a relatively modern BBS like system (it has integrated file transfer, message bases, and chatting). It's a little more advanced than FTP: it lets anyone connect but downloads are placed in a queue. So instead of redialing over and over and over again you just connect and start your download, and wait for the people in the queue ahead of you to finish. On popular sites that have lots of goodies I have literally had to wait in the queue for well over 24 hours to begin the actual file transfer.
I think the solution to the problem is a market based solution. Create a barter system for disk space, bandwidth, and CPU. In order to download something from someone and depelete their disk/bandwidth/cpu resources you must provide a comparable amount of resources. Since disk/bandwidth/cpu is a commodity, you can use a digital bearer instrument to represent those resources and create a fungible currency backed by the disk/cpu/bandwidth. Mojo Nation does exactly that, but you probably already knew I was going to say that.
Burris
"I would prefer to pay more than a $1 in royalties to an artist out of the $16 cost of a CD."
I am so sick of this argument. Does this mean you can go to the local BurgerWop and steal a few burgers, but tip the underpaid frontline staff a few bucks. These poor underpaid artists are there because they signed contracts and wanted the marketting and distribution given by these bastard RIAA companies. See Harmony Central for an insiders view on why traditional RIAA approaches are good for quite a bit of artists.
clif
It seems like all of these "truely" distributed will all have the problem of scaling poorly due to the large bandwidth overhead caused by things such as push requests and pings. Why not create a system that, although not truely distributed, doesn't really have to be as centralized as Napster?
Why not model it after DNS? There could be, oh, several dozen "root" servers that keep records of all the IPs that list where you could get files that have a certain file extension, (.zip, for example), much like the root servers for DNS, which list all the servers that serve the various TLDs. Then, when the requests reach the servers on the next level down, you recieve a list of IPs of servers that have a list of clients that have the file you are looking for. Like the DNS system, all the locations of the files you downloaded would be stored in "your" server, which would be on the bottom level of the hierarchy. The clients could be programmed to log into a different lowest-heirarchy server each time they log on, thereby providing some kind of load-balancing, so that no one lowest-rung server has significantly more clients connected than the other.
Although this would throw anonynimity out the window (with all the IPs cached somewhere), I think it would scale a lot better than Gnutella, since it would eliminate a lot of the traffic on the network, or at least channel it to the machines running the server application.
IANAP (I am not a programmer), but I know that a lot of Slashdotters are, so I am counting on everyone to let me know if I am either talking out of my ass, or if I have a genuinely good idea here.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
this post is for the information have-not's in the press... gnutella is not going to be 'the new home of napster fans' ... openNap will be.
I just fired up gnapster, and chose to 'browse OpenNap' servers, I have damned near 100 to choose from. All of these servers are indepenent, not related in any way to "napster" inc.
Sure, right now the song selection on these servers is pretty crappy, but following the mass exodus I'm sure some snappy hacker out there will write some sort of 'bridging' software to bring all these other servers together,
you poor media types just don't have a clue, do you?
In the article, Mr. kan says "[snip] in any case, Gnutella is nothing but a communications protocol. It'd be like suing English."
maybe the recording industry can get help
from Quebec politicians then, since they have
done such a great job in doing just that, i.e.
prosecuting English;-)
Why is Red Herring running the identical article as salon.com (here). I wasn't aware that these companies had a relationship.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Everyone seems to be missing, what I consider to be, the point in Gnutella: It isn't a Napster replacement, but proof that killing Napster isn't going to make the problem go away.
Sure Gnutella isn't scaling, but it was hacked up with minimal effort as a way to say "See, look what can be done, now who are you going to sue?" Consider it a prototype. A little more elbow grease and some community development and Gnutella's shortcomings could be removed.
Possibly but it might end up with the same sort of problems that some ftp servers suffer from, where the most popular ones are just impossible to connect to. (The major ones are mirrored but people's home-maintained ones often aren't, and they're also slow meaning connections take longer.)
One thing that might help though is if the rings were interconnected, and clients were able to cache the files available on all the other clients in each ring. If there weren't specific rings, it might be all the clients within two hops, or something like that. Okay so it wouldn't be gnutella anymore, it would have to be a next generation protocol.
If anything, this could help cut down on the hammering that every gnutella client gets from incoming searches which are virtually all failures.
I also think it could be a good idea if clients were able to organise themselves into a tree or graph, based on the file categories and filenames that they have. If it was known in advance roughly where a certain file would be, the search could be limited to that part of the network.
===
Gnutella was a great experiment, but it's time to move on to bigger and better things.
http://www.mojonation.net/
No, it is about my right to "steal" copyrighted material. See the difference?
--
I have tried Gnutella several times. Although it may be "better" than Napster in some ways, I still have found that it is harder to learn how to use, and it eats up bandwidth. The more people that are using the system, the more people there are sending searches to your computer. It slows everything down.
I think the bandwidth problem should be fixed first. A mid point has to be found betweena centralized server that databases all the files, and everyone sending the searches to everyone else. Of course, many people like Gnutella especially for the fact that it is completely decentralized. This coulc be a tough problem to fix.
-http://MSD.dyndns.org
-MSD.dyndns.org
"Sucks to your ass-mar"
Isn't it obvious that the best benefit of using something like Gnutella is the possibility of setting up "private" Gnutella nets?
Sharing with the whole world is always a problem. If you've got something everyone wants, they will always beat a path to your doorstep... with a number of friends in a "private" network, the grass might not all die as they cross your yard.
-Nev
-Nev
This article (wasn't it on Salon a while back?) highlights some good points in the middle of page 3, about the difficulties of open source projects to coordinate. There are hundreds of different projects each trying to accomplish similar goals, with tons of overlap and many at cross purposes. Without an evangelist like Linus, the gnutella projects are being very inefficient and not making much progress.
/. coders to help out with getting a solid protocol library built so any P2P application can easily be built on top of it.
But the flip side is that it leaves very few people to attack in a court case, requiring the RIAA to file thousands of suits to make any kind of impact. Many of the small groups could will not have the money to mount a legal defence, so they will fold, providing a bad precedence for the other suits. I have a bad feeling the RIAA lawyers are already considering tactics like this to stomp all over any gnutella/P2P protocol developers.
Until a few well led groups fix the underlying problems with the protocols, gnutella will never replace napster on such a large scale. I'd urge all
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
There are many alternatives to Gnutella, which have similarly decentralised networks, but if the alternatives are unearthed by Napster users and then flooded by demand, they too will get discovered by the RIAA, or even just collapse under the immense load. This is why the development of gPulp and other similar protocols needs to progress, as they will be more efficient with bandwidth and hopefully at least as difficult to shut down as the current Napster protocol. If there weren't so many leeches on Gnutella though, the RIAA would have more of a job shutting it down. As it is, only a small percentage of users are providing the majority of files, and whatever the RIAA says, they'll soon start going after individuals and restricting the 'supply' of files on peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella. I think I better go hide....
> but if Gnutella, which has some of the best open-source programmers
> on the Net behind it, can't survive the technical or legal challenges
> of critical mass, how will the other programs be any better prepared?
Mr. Fenning created Napster with the help of a few people.
Justin Frankel created Gnutella with the help of a few people in a few days.
The other programs don't have to be better prepared. They simply have to be better.
We've seen the best application that the Net has yet to provide.(*) We'll never forget what can be. What should be. What must be.
I'm itching all over, and some day, I'm going to scratch.
(*)- Admit it, when you first used Napster you said to yourself: "Holy shit, this thing is fast and does EXACTLY what I want it to, unlike 99% of every other piece of software and place on the net. This is EXACTLY how the world should be. This is spectacular."
While Gnutella's distribution algorithm scales badly, there's no reason a fully distributed system for a finite amount of content can't scale well. Netnews scales fine, for example. Once somebody builds something that caches popular stuff near people who want it, the bandwidth requirement should drop way down. channels to download content.
Maybe we can simply automate the recording industry out of existence. There's a niche market for live performers, of course, but maybe recorded audio was just a 20th century fad.
I think this account of GNUtella is obvious, but long overdue. Though I've been saying that GNUtella was flawed since day 1, it suprises me how much of slashdot used the "but there's always GNUtella argument". What's more, though somewhat less suprising, has been the tendency of the popular media lately to take this same attitude, acting as if massive piracy is necessarily unstoppable because of the idealized GNUtella.
One thing that I'd like to add to this argument against GNUtella is that, even if it or any of it's cousins could scale, I believe it'll ultimately fall due to the combination of two primary factors, the so-called "tragedy of the commons" and the threat of law. In other words, it's already been established that damn few people are willing to really share. Today, the only primary reasons not to share seem to be bandwidth and CPU concerns.
In the future one thing that will play a dramatic element in the mix, if RIAA must, is fear of lawsuits by the fileservers. Since the beginning of the spread of piracy online, there has been very little fear of enforcement. Put simply, neither the software industry nor the music industry has done much more than attempt to threaten the owner or the uplink of the server. However, if the industry starts prosecuting (or otherwise hurting) the top fileserves, that will mean that anyone who runs a server is putting themselves at risk.
Put it this way, as redherring alluded to, there is very little reward for sharing files. Yet, there are costs (i.e., bandwidth, cpu/hd utilization, and time). So here we have a new emerging cost, the threat of getting busted. If they go after the top 1% of fileservers without fail, I think it is reasonable to assume that most everyone will make sure that they're not in the top 1%. Thus the entire organization will collapse from the top down.
It need not even necessarily be criminal prosecution. If the industry can effectively get a user blackballed from all broadband ISPs, how many users are going to risk it? Think about how many of these servers are either being run off of DSL, cable modem, or universities. I can tell you that most of these authorities can, will, and have, rapidly shutdown offending users services. Those users that share the most, are also most likely to not cope with losing high speed service. It's a significant threat.
The cost benefit ratio for the file servers is very poor as is, so low that I doubt it'll withstand serious additional pressure by industry. I know many of you will clamor, "but one will always pop backup"...but this is flawed logic. Why would any rational individual pop up and make himself a target?
Though it may be true that COLLECTIVELY if no one runs scared, then those industry tactics would be ineffective. But this is thinking too much like a group. It's like saying that automobile traffic would be infinitely better if everyone aheared to a few basic rules (i.e., no cutting other drivers off, left lane for passing only, etc). That is very true, but that doesn't mean that it is better for the individual in the driver seat at that moment. At that moment, the individual is thinking like an individual, not as a group, so, traffic happens. Likewise, "tragedy of the commons" will happen.
I can easily see RIAA coming after all of the top fileservers (no matter what the protocol). So long as the uploader/fileserver is known, they can be targeted.
Well, all the developers who work on GPLed software, and by extension, Redhat, all have granted the right of redistribution to you. Musicians and labels haven't.
Funny though the correlation between Developer and Musician, Redhat and Record Label. You all should think about that one for a little while.
And yes, things like napster and gnutella could have legitamate uses, but overwhelmingly, they're not used for those uses, IMHO. But even then, distributing Redhat over gnutella would seem to almost violate the GPL in that the person that gives you the binaries is obligated to give you the source if you want it. It's not Redhat's responsibility to give it to you if you acquired it through that medium... So if you wanted it and for some reason couldn't get it from redhat, or the distributor, someone just violated the GPL, correct?
Mojo Nation is a p2p file sharing protocol that has a built-in digital cash system. It prevents the "Tragedy of the Commons" problem by effectively creating a barter system for bandwidth, disk space, and CPU. In order to search, upload, download, or otherwise consume any resources from the remote host you must compensate them with the internal currency, known as Mojo. The Mojo represents the resources you are consuming from the counterparty. This way nobody can consume more resources than they are contributing to the system. Each person who joins helps to make it stronger. Note that contributing resources doesn't mean uploading files. You must pay Mojo to upload since you are consuming other servers disk, bandwidth, and CPU by uploading blocks to them and asking the servers to hold them.
The best way to get Mojo, so you can get the files you are interested in, is to provide your own resources (bandwidth, disk, CPU) to the network by using the Mojo Nation Broker (our name for the client software) to run a Block Server, Content Tracker, or Relay server.
A Block Server holds the actual data. In Mojo Nation, instead of holding an entire file on a single server, every file is broken up into many redundant blocks which are spread over many block servers throughout the network. You only need half of the available blocks to reassemble the original file. Of course, the Broker does all of the hunting for and reassembling of blocks transparently. In this way Mojo Nation is like a big distributed RAID drive which makes it resistant to servers disappearing. It also spreads the load out over many hosts, so when you download you are not impacting any single host or network connection severely (expect perhaps your own). It also means that hosts with slow net connections can hold data since each block is pretty small. Your Broker can download some blocks from slower servers in parallel with more blocks from faster servers. The Broker keeps track of performance statistics for each host so it can make intelligent choices about where to purchase blocks from.
Content Trackers are like the search engines in Mojo Nation. Instead of routing all searches through the entire network (which is what is bringing Gnutella down). Mojo Nation has centralized content trackers, but anyone can run one. The content trackers store rich XML metadata describing the files so you can easily search on different fields. The metadata also holds the instructions for your Broker to find and reassemble the blocks that comprise the file. So if you run a Block Server but not a content tracker you cannot know what data you are holding.
Relay Servers are for people behind firewalls. Mojo Nation is an asynchronous protocol. Relay Servers are used so you can send a request to someone behind a firewall. The Relay server holds messages for the clients to pickup, in exchange for some Mojo of course. Relay Servers will also be used for Digital Mix untraceability, much like the old Cypherpunk remailers.
In any event, it is extremely cool and is definitely worth checking out
Burris
If you're concerned you didn't find something because you were on the wrong ring, just switch which ring you're on. Of course, this is mostly good for mp3 sharing where there's pretty much always a critical mass of SOMETHING you want. If you were to use Gnutella for, say, an album release, you'd run into problems not being on every ring. Of course, with transactions that are mainly 1-way like that, you could just post a website.
Anyway, there would be advantages to this setup.
People like to trump it up, but anonymity doesn't really work that well in large groups. It's the shared restaraunt bill problem; the hotmail spam problem; it's even the slashdot problem. Fact is, some level of accountability is required for a society to function.
If Gnutella had some sort of democratic "trust" system, so that people could build co-operative networks, it might have a chance.
Another problem with this idea is that it (unlike Napster) is illegal under the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act and the DMCA. The AHRA specifically legalized the noncommercial sharing of all recorded music; the DMCA further "clarified" the definition of "noncommercial" to include only those instances of sharing in which nothing is gained in return. In other words, a service in which one person shares while expecting nothing in return from anyone who downloads from him or her is noncommercial, and thus legal, whereas one in which something is expected in return--i.e. a traditional ratio FTP site, and potentially the scheme you've laid out here--is not.
Of course, the only reason this would be necessary is if Napster is found to be illegal anyways, so I suppose the point is moot. On the other hand, as others have pointed out, this scheme seems to rely inherently on trusted clients, which is a bad idea in any system, much less an open-source mixed-client protocol like Gnutella.
Actually in my original submission i included a link to the salon article, as that was where it was from -- the note was just that the more managerial magazines were covering the subject ..
bemis
-i was drunk enough to walk through walls -- so back off
Yeah scour.net does this, indexing media on HTTP and FTP sites. It sucks. There is no way to confirm the availability of the servers reliably. The site attempts to ping the sites and remove unavailable ones, but if you have ever used the system, you know how inferior it is. If someone could build a better system layered on top of FTP, then this would have a chance.
Scour.net was around almost a full year before Napster. That should tell you something about the relative reliabilities of the two systems.
-
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Forwarding search requests through every host is really helping drag down Gnutella, but it has an upside. The Fury client, for instance, lets you watch the search requests fly by as they are routed through your box. It is very interesting (for a little while at least) to see what goes by. Here is what most people are looking for on Gnutella (not a scientific survey):
Porn - teens and Jenna Jameson, an any mpegs, movs, vobs, divxs, avis, etc...
Music - metallica (just out of spite), Britney, N'Sync, Backstreet Boys
Warez - Photoshop.
Burris
If you ask me, every connection to a server should be given a number, and 30 minutes of time downloading from the server. If any files are downloaded, the next time that computer connects to that server, it returns the number. The files the computer is sharing are checked, and if 75% or more are present, the client is rewarded with 50 minutes of download time from said server. If 35% or more of the downloaded files are being shared, the client gets 35 minutes of time on the server. If 10% of the files are being shared, the client still gets 30 minutes of time. If none of the files are being shared, the server returns a 'No connections availiable' error.
To accomodate this system, downloads would have to be resumable, or course. They could be listed from searches along with a SHA-1 fingerprint, so you could resume from any of a number of servers with identical files.
The system would, of course, offer more than 50 minutes of download time for users who consistently make availiable more than 75% of what they download, that is if you download 30 minutes of files and keep 75% of them, then the next day you download 50 minutes of files and make all of them availiable also, you micht get 70 minutes of download time.
They could also use a 'Speed limit' system, i.e. people who don't make availiable many of teh files they download might be limited to 1.8kbps download bandwidth, but as you get a good reputation, you get more and more server time.
The good thing about this system is, since there would be no communication of information between servers, if you got a bad reputation on one, you could easily move on to another to get more minutes on the same day, thus spreading out usage more between servers.
It's just an idea. I don't grogram Gnutella.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
You could probably go off IP address and distribute the rating across the Internet. Nothing to keep the PPP users from disconnecting and reconnecting on a different IP but that might even be detectable algorithmically, and the modem users aren't really going to be your biggest bandwidth vampires anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
--
A mind is a terrible thing to taste.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
...fact.
Napster was designed and built from the ground up as a music only file sharing system. All of it's functions are to identify, tag, categorize and distribute mp3 files.
Gnutella, and the others, are not meant to do this - they can share anything and everything, and they do. They don't have code to analyze bit-rates, length, etc..
So, how can anyone attempt litigation against it? It was designed to share anything you want to share, much like FTP. If the RIAA can prevent gnutella from distribution, then well that means FTP, HTTP, gopher... hell, even TCP, all are just as at fault.
Please don't give me that "it's primary use is for mp3 distribution" crap. That couldn't work- it's use was to share files, and mp3's are a.. popular file to share. FTP's primary use could be claimed to be mp3 sharing. Oh no!
This would be akin to saying:
'A gun's primary use is to kill people, so we should make guns illegal. Sorry all you hunters and sportsmen.'
'A knife's primary use is to kill people. Sorry all you cooks, and all you people who want to eat steak. You'll have to use a spork.'
'Oops! Looks like dynamite's primary use is to blow up buildings with people in them. Dynamite should be illegal. Sorry all you ski resorts who want to make things safe by making avalanches. Sorry all you construction crews - your just going to have to use pick-axes.'
See where I'm getting at?
Oh... IANAL... heh.
First, many people such as myself have downloaded music from Napster. But the type of music downloaded is important. I have downloaded songs from my past. These songs are important to me because they represent my youth. But now I have a gig or so of my youth, and that is all I need of that type of music.
New music I do not dl from Napster; I stream that from mp3.com. THis music is from unknown artists. When I compare it to new mainstream music, music which must be paid for, I find it to be just as good.
That is because new mainstream music does have its hooks in me like the old music. And BTW, this is the real intellectual property insofar as music is concerned: connection to the listeners' past.
But all these former dynamics will be swept aside by the new Net distribution model. I encourage all of you to try streaming some of the new music from www.mp3.com, especially the electronic music; often this is made by one person on a computer. It's fantastic! Also check out all the foreign ethnic music offerings. It's all free and legal--and very good.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Gnutella is certainly not the streamlined, centralized system that Napster is, but that's like arguing that underground 'zine distribution is not as efficient as the major publishing houses. Gnutella's beauty is in the fact that it is accessible to all, but is controlled by no one. Performance can be improved and tuned over time. What's exciting about Gnutella is that it is a "proof-of-concept" for unrestricted, unstoppable file transfer. Whether you like goatsex, Metallica, or Hemingway, you must admit that the concept is brilliant.
Gnutella is exactly what it is supposed to be . . . a successful experiment. Give the open-source folks some time to iron out the technical details (strangling off nodes that don't share, and automatically routing through faster hosts, for two simplistic examples), and Gnutella becomes the foundation for the future of file transfer. This is what science fiction imagined that computer networks could become; we are now watching (or helping) it happen!
Gnutella is not perfect. But it is the start of something big.