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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."
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?