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.

Comments

Java vs. Gtk+ clients

[mj6798]

Well, several points:

• If it wasn't written in Java, you wouldn't be getting it at all, since it would be Windows-only (or, at best, FLTK or wxWindows).
• The download isn't 3.4M, it's about 1M.
• The Java runtime download isn't 14M, it's about 9M.
• You seem to be assuming that Gnome/Gtk is somehow free while Java needs to be downloaded. Why? The Gnome/Gtk libraries, as well as the C support libraries, are huge downloads. I remember last time I installed a basic Gnome desktop, I needed to download about 20-30M.
• Sun's Java runtime isn't slow, although the Java GUI libraries are clearly less efficient than Gtk+. But, then, Gtk+ is also hugely less efficient than Xaw. As machines get faster, we create and use toolkits that are more convenient and less efficient. The Java toolkits have a lot more functionality and are generally easier to program and more robust than Gtk+.

Even better than gtk-gnutella

[Moritz Moeller - Her]

OK, I have used Limewire in the past and I like it a lot, but the CPU load makes me cry. If you share a lot of files, the CPU load becomes unbearable and slows down your system. I have looked at gtk-gnutella, I have toyed with Phex (another Java client), I have compiled gnut and so on. But only recently I found the right app for my KDE desktop:
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.