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The Gnutella War: Free vs. Commercial
Anenga writes "Slyck has an interesting interview with Mike of Shareaza regarding Gnutella2 (see older stories), where he expresses his opinions on how Gnutella2 has been recieved within both the user and developer community. The reaction from the top commercial clients, Limewire and BearShare, on Gnutella2 (as seen in the GDF and elsewhere) is that they will not support it because of how it was presented, however, Gnucleus (free, open source) plans to support it and feels the GDF is not seeing the bigger picture. John Marshall of Gnucleus says 'Now it's more like "Free vs Commercial" clients, which [the latter] would rather develop their own next generation protocol (which would probably never happen).' The article in short: Shareaza will keep Gnutella2 open/free, it's already been very successful with a 80-100k growing userbase, Gnutella2 was *not* based on Limewire's GUESS proposal and is in fact very different from it and Shareaza will continue to both support the original Gnutella ('G1') and of course G2."
What I don't understand is how desperate you have to be to go commercial with application which is used mainly for illegal file sharing. I mean, cmon people are sharing mp3's, divx-ripps, applications and games. Not like somebody would actually download mpegs of my pets or my kid brother's birthday. Not that I am preaching, but it was kinda gray activity, we all know what it is used for. Going commercial is going to be the death of it, but hey they, are just lazy and are trying to make a living without having a proper job. I wish somebody would pay me money to change desktop backgrounds in my blackbox, and play around with my Eterm, because I think it's fun. I kinda grow out of that idea long time ago, and had a nice job since... Get a life.
I think the paragraph that pays for me is:
"The GDF's first reaction was negative because they claimed it used the same ideas from other proposals. Once the protocol specs were released this was obviously false, but the GDFs reaction was still negative so Mike has not bothered to release the rest of the specs.
What it really sounds like is that the commercial entities are balking for something. That is, they are negotiating with their veto.What specifically they want out of this, whether it is a voice in the process or perhaps a cut of the action, I'm not entirely clear. I'd like more on what the author of the article called the 'backstory'.
--- have you healed your church website?
I'm not a Shareaza fan, But I think Mike is within his rights to call his protocol Gnutella2 if he wishes.
I've been following this thing for a while now and this is my view. Gnutella was made by a group of developers at nullsoft, right? They never trademarked the name and eventually abandoned the technology all together, I believe.
GDF is an ad hoc group put together to continue the development, but have no special rights concerning gnutella.
Love him or Hate him, I think Mike is perfectly in his rights to call his protocol Gnutella2. It's not a very nice thing to do, but he is within his rights.
The GDF should accept this, realize that at any time someone can create a 'Gnutellan' and all the GDF need to do is that when describing their protocols, specify the version that they created and/or endorse. eg 0.6, etc.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
The commercial interests do not want to be compatible with "truely free" clients because their business model is based completely on bundling spyware with their application. If a spyware-free program that has access to the same network exists, who'd download their spyware?
My question would have to be why Limewire/Bearshare/etc have flat out decided to absolutely not support the new protocol
Seems to be two reasons. One is, the new protocol is (at this date) proprietary and not open, though it is being heavily marketed. There are promises that it will be open, some day.
The other reason is that they're seriously annoyed that the new protocol was named "Gnutella2", which implies that it is superior to Gnutella. Maybe it is, but naming it thus was a marketing coup at the expense of personal relations with the other developers. Kind of like calling your linux distribution "ImprovedRedHat" even though it never was RedHat to begin with.
What I'm trying to understand is why does everybody and their brother build a brand new P2P network (or try to)? This is another geek vs. businessman thing where a bunch of geeks are creating things for no apparent reason whatsoever other than the fact they may think it's "cool".
What Gnutella is trying to do is make an open, operable standard which then can be implemented by many clients, thus simultaneously making all of those clients better, and therefore making so that even though there are many clients, the network they are on is good.
In a sense P2P networks are similar to encryption methods. New compression methods will constantly be discovered. The reason why people choose to use them even though it will break compatiblity with old clients is that they're better (smaller, faster, etc...). P2P is at the same stage compression methods were 10 years ago. Some people come up with new P2P networks as an academic exercise. Others implement them because they are better than what they have. Your argument may make sense 10 years from now when the P2P process is nearly optimized (similar to compression now), and then, the more people we have sharing one network, the better. However, when there is signifcant room for improvement, it is always better to implement the new standards instead of trying to maintain compatibility with the old ones.