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LimeWire Goes Open-Source
The famous Anonymous Coward writes: "I saw over on Gnutella News that LimeWire LLC announced that they're releasing the LimeWire codebase under the GPL license and that they've setup limewire.org as a site dedicated to Gnutella and LimeWire development. LimeWire's codebase is currently being used by two of the most popular Gnutella clients: LimeWire and SwapNut. As far as I know, this is the first time a formerly closed-source file-sharing codebase this popular has been open-sourced." gtk-gnutella is coming along nicely for Linux, but more competition is always better.
LimeWire seems to the best Linux client around. Correct me if I am wrong. Way to go guys!
Translating java bytecode back into source code is not very hard. LimeWire, being a java app, was halfway open source already.
Sure, the function, class and variable names would be lost, but unless they did some screwy compiling, a halfway decent decompiler would make it readable enough to debug, rewrite, port or repair.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
I've been using the Windows version for a while now.
They keep adding improvements fairly steadily. Each release is more stable and has better features than the last.
They really had nothing to lose going open source.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
limewire is one of my favorite gnutella clients, also the first decent windowed java app I've seen. I commend them for doing this, but have to wonder how this fits into there business plane. They just made a deal with File Metrics Inc to brand Limewire tech as SwapNut. but why would they make there source (read: IP) free if there business plane is to license there IP?
-Jon
this is my sig.
gtk-gnutella progress is pretty much stopped dead in it's tracks. That's not to say it isn't a decent clone, but at least support versions that are actually prograssing, like Napshare.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Is it me, or is everyone else reluctant to download some slow java program with a klunky ui that's 3.44 meg plus the 14.4 meg JRE 1.3; over a lean, mean gtk version that's a 157k download that I can set up with ./configure; make install?
/. crowd. :)
;)
I mean, I wish the limewire people the best, they've obviously put in a lot of hard work and long hours, but it just pains me to see a program that big and inefficient. Is it ever going to be possible to compile a java programs into small to medium sized, standalone executables? I realize you normally need to have the java virtual machine running, but this just seems... messy.
All you java advocates, this is your chance to defend your language of choice and explain it to me and the rest of the
And yes, I have used limewire before, albeit quite awhile ago.
Sure, this is a little bit off topic, but how often can you say yay, another program is open sourced.
I use gnut, a console gnutella client available here
It's fast, featureful and is by now very stable, despite the low version number.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
gtk-gnutella isn't "coming along nicely". It hasn't been updated in forever, constantly crashes, lacks outbound filesharing, and many other features.
When everything looks bleak - terrorist attack, lost of lives, liberty, and even FREE SPEECH, and open-source projects either folded (going to close source) or were yanked due to legal pressure and such - this is indeed a good news !
Thanks !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
gtk-gnutella is coming along nicely for Linux, but more competition is always better.
No offense Michael, but I disagree. I don't know how it is with file sharing systems on Linux, but Windows is glutted with the things. I've used a few and my college roommate experimented with tons of the things. I don't want a lot of variety, I just want a simple interface and a simple system that finds what I want and is relatively lawsuit proof.
Google is the ideal for web searching and something approaching that caliber for file searching would be wonderful. Make it easy, stable to use, and uncomplicated, then get everyone to use it (or make it interoperable with other networks) so that you have the best chance of finding what you want.
For you KDE-users out there, just apt-get (or rpm or tgz or whatever) the really nice "qtella"-client. it just rocks.
Junior high students at least go to the library and do a little research.
This is a trull. Ignore it.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Gnucleus is an open source Gnutella Client, and from all the ones i've tested so far (LimeWire, SwapNut, Bearshare, Gnutella [Classic], Gnut) it's the f***in best. Like every other client it takes some time to connect, but after Gnucleus is connected it's really fast. It's Windows only for now, but the developers say it should work great in wine, cause it uses the MFC of Windows. I haven't tried that yet.
X
Boycot? Blackout? Subscriptions?
I don't care!
The Linux download appears to be larger, but that must be something related to the Linux packaging (worse or no compression perhaps?).
Well if you were to some how search and find(I couldn't find it for some reason when searching) there was a story on /. about a linux distro written in assembly. Its about as barebones as you're gonna get.
what's the point in trying if you're going to fail anyway?
This would reduce the number of downloads of the Java JRE to one and would make updates much more user friendly.
:-(
And at last, Java Web Start would have its first killer app.
I wrote this to the tech department, but the mail bounced
Bye egghat.
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
But when will the leading P2P sharing programs work with each other? How about a "plugin" system. I would like one program that works with all the systems.
Also, for all the talk of GUIs, all the current programs I have seen suck. If you want to see real innovation in intuitive and functional interfaces, see the headway that Apple Computer has been making with some of their appliance applications, such as "iTunes" and "Sherlock."
A plug-in system would facilitate specialization by developers who want to make new algorithms, implement new protocols, or create new interfaces.
QTELLA.
size below 200 k nice interface (like limewire but prettier -> KDE2 conforming)
Screenshots here!
Has all the features one would need. Of course it is a lot faster than Limewire.
Finally one thin I would like to see: A pure and true gnutella server daemon. No GUI. No nothing. Even gnut requires logging in. So how can I start a gnutella client by ssh? How do I control it ? Not possible, the program clkoses as soon as I drop the ssh connection. Now that would be a nice feature in a gnutella client.
Moritz
Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly ... All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS
But not in ReiserFS.
Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
Cheap hardware designed to be put in a $500 PC that a user shuts down every night is generally not designed to run 24/7. Try doing your tests on a quality workstation or server. Yes, Linux has bugs. Yes, you can help by documenting them so that kernel developers can reproduce them consistently. No, this doesn't stop Google from using a Linux system.
A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification.
Are you referring to the GNU tools? In that case, why do Solaris admins routinely install GNU software on their machines?
a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages
Example?
If you don't answer these questions in the next version of this troll, even more of us will refuse to bite.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Agreed.
:-)
It works really, really well on OS X, what with the built in Java 2 and all.
To me downloading 14 MB Java [technology] for a single application doesn't make any sense since I have no other use for it.
Uh... it contains a plugin that renders Java applets in Mozilla and Opera?
Will I retire or break 10K?
gtk-gnutella is coming along nicely for Linux, but more competition is always better.
As has been already said, gtk-gnutella is not doing anything nicely, it seems to crash after just a few minutes of use. What other didn't seem to mention is that Napshare,
while it looks almost identical to gtk-gnutella, has no stability problems whatsoever, even though it's version 1.0 * 10^-7 or something =-) I guess that show that version #s really don't mean squat. Try napshare if you want an X11 gnutella client, it fits the bill quite well.
v2sw7CUPhw5ln6pr5Pck4ma7u7LFw0m6g/l7Di5e6t5Ab6TH.
Wrong again. Kaffe 1.0.6 is 3.41 MB
LimeWire is an AWT app. How is Kaffe's AWT support coming along?
Will I retire or break 10K?
No Java virtual machine could be found from your PATH environment variable.
If you were using a GTK+ based app without GTK+ installed, you would get a similar message from ./configure.
Will I retire or break 10K?
ReiserFS is still beta software.
"Beta" != low quality. Much of the "beta" stuff in Linux performs better than the equivalent things in the Windows 9x kernel. ReiserFS vs. FAT32?
My Windows 2000 and XP machines run great on this hardware.
Do you run them 24/7, or do you shut them down after surfing for two hours?
Sun using certain tools doesn't make those tools good.
On the contrary, Sun sponsoring the tools' website helps fund improving the tools.
See this for an example [of childish messages]. You'll get the point.
Sorry, but I don't. I couldn't find "child"ish or "juv"enile or "imma"ture or anything similar in the article you mentioned. Could you please explain?
Will I retire or break 10K?
>And the TUCOWS and C|NET search pages don't serve you how? Try too much fucking hype for various "services" that don't have anything to do with searching or anything else you may be doing at the moment.
In the spirit of free-as-in-chaos, I have instituted my own private moderation system. Under this system, I hereby give you -1 for CannedText.
How many times are you going to post this silly FUD? You could at least write something fresh each time, and rise to the status of FlameBait.
-- MarkusQ
The Java toolkits have a lot more functionality and are generally easier to program and more robust than Gtk+.
.NET) seems to be a lot faster than Java, and a bit easier to program. Either way, computers are supposed to be Human Centered, so if the computer has to do more work for the sake of less human work (!= human sloppyness), I'm all for it.
For us M$ developers, GDI+ (the graphics interface for
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Limewire.com seems to be slashdotted or otherwise unavailable (even tried the google cache), but there is a good article from digitalmusicweekly.com about Limewire LLC and how the Limewire client fits in. Basically, they want to make money from servers (or something like that), and never wanted to charge money for the client in the first place. So GPL'ing it makes lots of sense - they don't lose anything and they might gain development help, more users, and stuff like that.
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost.
Sadly, true. Unfortunately, you can't fix it without admitting that there is a problem, and I haven't had any luck convincing anyone that Linux has serious user-friendliness flaws. Can't see the forest for the trees, I suppose...
Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market.
Bullshit, plain and simple. Get the services installed, leave everything else off and the systems just run. Witness our RADIUS server, numerous fileservers and firewalls (all with hundreds of days of uptime and the only maintenance is a script which rotates logfiles and emails unusual activity) -- all with hundreds of days of uptime.
Like any other OS, the admin is responsible for monitoring the security mailing lists and installing patches. And like any other OS, you get what you pay for in an admin.
Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly.
That's a bold-faced flat-out lie. I run Linux on this laptop and have NUMEROUSLY had the volume level down too low to hear the battery alarm crying out. I've lost power at least three or four dozen times this year with no data loss.
Where EXT2 does lose data badly is when the metadata store gets corrupted (power dies when it's being updated or the drive gets bad sectors in those areas) -- However I also know that Reiser, NTFS and VFAT will die horribly under those cirumcstances too.
Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices.
Let's see some hard numbers. I've been running 2.2.x kernels for literally YEARS without crashes. Quit running alpha drivers and unstable kernels and your stability will increase. This is just common sense.
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost.
So you consider a Win32 admin someone who can go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com? Or a SCO admin someone who can call the support hotline they pay for? I don't understand (nor have you given proof) for increased TCO for Linux.
(an aside: The Code Red fix wasn't included in any patches available from there. So whose fault is that, Microsoft for not making security a priority, or the click-happy "admin" for not knowing better?)
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
I dunno, I've had no problems setting up and casually[1] admining firewalls, SMTP/IMAP/POP servers, LDAP servers, web servers and plain old fileservers. Like I said, once it is up and running, there is next to zero maintenance. This can be done with any unix; For me, Linux makes the most sense and none of my clients have had complaints about "increased costs of their Linux servers." I don't know whether you're a Win2k, SCO, Sun, QNX or *BSD troll, and frankly I don't care. Your post is so full of shit that I just had to feed you. FUD is FUD.
[1] - I use the term "casually admin" to describe what I do: monitor the security lists, provide updates as necessary and receive the emailled logs. The only time I ssh in is to change the configuration based on a customer's request or perform security updates. To me, this is exactly what server administration should be.
Installing new programs/configuring old ones, I'll give you. You have to wade through a bunch of man pages and websites to even figure out which of the 200 /etc files you should be looking in.
However I recently installed Redhat 7.1, and it was at least as easy - if not easier - to do a default workstation install than Win98 (the last one I installed). All my hardware was auto-detected, and works perfectly - which is commendable for a system for which many companies still do not provide drivers.
If I were an average Windows user who didn't want anything more than out-of-the-box usability, then this would have been perfect for me. As soon as install was done, I had web access, e-mail, an office suite (not perfect, as people will point out, but still good), more built-in card games than Windows can shake a stick at, etc, etc. It took me a complete screw-up of KDE to figure out rpm, but now that I can use that, I don't have to worry about installations anymore either.
The biggest learning-curve problem is that there is no easy-to-use GUI version of a lot of command-line stuff, so people still have to know their way around the command line. Even that's disappearing though, so I think the learning-curve problem will be no worse than Windows' in a short while.
Last post!
Sure it's a LITTLE slower than a regular app, but Limewire's latest release fixed a lot of issues that previous versions had (like the redraw after 'unhiding' is fixed for the most part), doesn't crash at startup as much and is a little faster than the last rev...[digression:but this version won't hold preferences for sharing files]. until macphex (ALSO JAVA) puts a file type option in the search capabilities, i'm using limewire.
-- Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. -Friedrich Nietzche, "Thus Spake Zarathustra"
First off, I'd like to point out that Linux is not the same as Open Source software.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
From this I conclude that you have never had to administrate an MS-based network. We keep up with the latest stuff, use all-MS solutions, and our sysadmin has to put out fires semi-daily. SO much for claiming to represent those in the trenches.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
I use dodgy hardware a lot of the time, and my machines frequently get nuked by power cuts. I have never had anything that fsck has not fixed automatically. Ever (OK, one exception - I had to enter the root pasword and follow the simple on-screen instructions to run fsck manually). I have, however, seen several fs's get nuked completely by a power off, and they were all - guess what? - windows FAT partitions. I can see the word "scandisk" appearing on your lips, but that didn't do a thing - and because of the behind-the-scenes and non-configurable system startup, when it touched something vital, I had to bloody reinstall the whole OS rather than just the bit which had failed.
The upcoming 'solution' to this, EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'.
EXT3 doesn't try to fix these (as far as I can see) nonexistant grave problems. It is simply what you say it is - a hack to get journalling onto EXT". Incidentally, journalling does give far better crash support so I can't really see what you're whining about there.
This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
See my earlier comments about comparing DOS/FAT filesystems with EXT2. Plus, of course, the objection is mostly that MS chose such a cruddy OS to build themselves around (8.3 filenames? Yeeuurgh!), rather than just emulating it (which is what they do now with the NT codebase, and is far less brain-damaged).
Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally.
Examples? A reference to some of the downtime-statistics pages would be useful, as last time I checked I found Linux-hosted sites were far harder to push over than Win2K ones. (This is in addition to personal experience with our network).
Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
I have worked with old and buggy as well as bleeding-edge kernels, and I have still never had a crash apart from with dodgy memory (which also nuked Winblows on startup with no diagnostic info whatsoever), and the teardrop attack, which is now defended against.
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification.
As you accuse others of evidence-free FUD, could you come up with a defence of this please? What buggy stuff, apart from the things labelled beta? What badly-implemented UNIX features?
On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude. And as for specifications, Linux is considered one of the reference POSIX implementations.
The talent in abundance is indicated by the fact that you rarely see any of these error messages. Plus, of course, I far prefer to see an "oops" and an apology from the programmer when a crash occurs, rather than Windows' cold wording and habit of blaming it all on the "current application".
I could go on and on, but the conclusion is clear. This is an uninformed troll, possibly an astroturf, with little grounding in reality or experience.
JDK this, GTK that... who cares, I just wanna know why my mouse wheel doesn't work.
I can dowload 300 mp3s at once with Limewire, but my damn mouse wheel won't scroll for anything.
One thing I've always wanted was to just specify a file and leave it to go get it and download it itself.
In particular if 5 sites have the file I should be able to connect to all 5 of them (or try to) and download different parts of the file in parallel; the protocol allows you to start wherever you want to.
The total load on the network is the same because I'm only connected to each server for 1/5 the time, but I would usually get it faster.
Of course sometimes, one of the files is corrupted or something- it's possible to check the ends of the fragments and splice them correctly or ignore any bits that don't fit.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Oh yea sure. Gnotella crashes constantly for me. Even see their weblog about freezing.
Blek. Gontella sucks dogs. This is not a troll, just an anecdote of my personal experience. I'm sure it's my fault for installing windows, right?
Right, give up *before* you try!
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
>(bearshare permanently monitors your internet
> usage with backgroud tasks).
No it doesn't, and that statement is pure FUD.
The third party programs included with BearShare are optional (all you have to do is un-check the checkboxes during installation) and they do not monitor your internet usage any more than Macromedia does. When you visit a web page with Flash content, the Flash plugin "knows" this and displays the movie. Similarly, when you visit a web page which is cooperating with one of BearShare's third party programs, the program "knows" this and displays an ad.
For the last fucking time, Onflow does not send your browser history to the NSA! Please stop spreading paranoia.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Try www.xolox.nl. Arguably the hottest Gnutella client, due to its elegant ease of fetching files with multiple simultaneous segmented downloads.
A little buggy yet, though. And closed source, Microsoft only.
Anssi Porttikivi / app@iki.fi
The purpose of article isn't how Java is slow, or whether gtk-gnutella is updated or not, or windows run Java better than Linux (heard OS/2)
The purpose why this is real big news sits right at http://www.download.com . A program which is downloaded 250.000 times a week goes opensource!
Limewire also makes a great job for you, anti C# guys! When its downloaded, it downloads latest JAVA VM to that clueless end users machine!
I can't believe how clueless feedbacks this big news for opensource gets!
LimeWire is a swing app, not an AWT app.
That's like saying "foo is an MFC app, not a Win32 app." JFC (also called Swing) is a layer around AWT and some other classes.
Will I retire or break 10K?
OK, so it's a troll. But it's a Saturday afternoon, I'm bored, and so I'll bite.
:^)
First off, Linux includes many programs from many authors, and many different licenses, many of which initially look the same, but have drastically different implications.
Want to edit a file? Better get a lawyer on retainer to make sure the license allows you to edit a proprietary document. Or that using the FTP server doesn't make everything you make available public domain.
No OSS licence I know of does things like making its raw data or output public domain. As for editing source, no OSS licences restrict editing source, else they wouldn't be open source licences (see opensource.org). And of course, if you compare this to closed-source products, which you can never edit at all, even the mythical restrictive licences you are referring to would be an improvement.
Another problem is the security, or lack of it. Linux boasts enhanced security since anyone can view the source (A claim that hasn't been backed up by research). While it is true that the source code is available for viewing, the lack of standards in coding and sheer complexity makes it difficult to verify security.
Well, some people seem to have managed well enough to make it several times more secure than any commercial OS I've seen! Anyway, you can't check proprietary source at all, so why are you whining?
Additionally, Linux most often comes precompiled from a distribution, which could have added secret "backdoors" to the software.
True, this is a possibility, but it's never been shown to have happened. Commercial vendors, though, can include backdoors, and have (Front Page anyone?)
As for the bumph of recompiling, most recompiles go jsut fine with the default options. And as for introducing backdoors, from your own assumptions that's impossible - they would have been seen there by other people working on the project.
This is a blatant troll with no regard for the facts, but hey, as I said, I was bored