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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."
My question would have to be why Limewire/Bearshare/etc have flat out decided to absolutely not support the new protocol, when it seems fairly obvious that both protocols could be implemented within one client. I understand their wish perhaps develop their own proprietary protocol, but this seems like treading water to me. SPECIFICALLY in a P2P architecture, wouldn't more protocols be a direct correlation to access to more files, and in that case, an increase in popularity, quality and then, in turn, profitability?
Sig.i>
In recent years p2p systems have caught the fancy of CS researchers. Gnutella always gave the feeling of being designed more by hackers than people with a sound theoretical base.
Has Gnutella2 taken cue from the recent research publications?
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?
The published interview is about as balanced as a Linux press-release issued by Microsoft. A couple of points to consider:
- Shareeza has implemented a new protocol and released it soely on it's own client. It hasn't publish any hard details and it's dubbed it "Gnutella2" with no support from existing supporters of the Gnutella protocol.
- The existing clients are a bit upset that Mike has done this, and his actions since, but doesn't really have an opinion on the technology becuase its specifications have not been released.
This seems to me as a fairly egotistical kid hijacking the Gnutella name for his own purposes, then charactising eveybody else as bitter about his wonderful new tchnology.
Theworse thing is that the GDF even pay attention to this fellow, they should just igonre him rather than waste their energy on being upset at his lack of manners.
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
In about 10 years from now, Russia will be the freest country in the world I guess. America is the next police state, Europe does its best to fit American needs, China's people are all prisoners anyway of their government... Oh, Russio is oppressive, too. But they do not have the money to control and dragoon their hole state, so overall it will be the freest country...
I agree that you have a point about "proprietary," but I think the word "commercial" in the article and synopsis is accurate. There are three types of Gnutella clients:
a) Those which are free to download, free to use, and open-source
b) Those which cost money to download and use (e.g. "BearShare Pro")
c) Those which are free to download, free to use, closed-source, and invariably "ad-supported"
It's category c being referred to as "commercial" Gnutella clients. They're the ones who are in it to make some sort of a profit or at least to generate revenue - the software comes bundled with some adware or another - thus they are indeed "commercial" in nature.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Raphael Manfred: "I'm speaking only for myself here, but I will NOT support Mike's protocol unless I'm forced to do it. I was neutral-positive when this saga started, but Mike ruined it all by his stubborn attitude, and I'm now rather hostile-negative.
If there are good ideas in what he did, you can rest assure that we'll end up using them. He'll even get credit for those ideas, but it will be within the Gnutella network."
"tonygeek": I am sceptical. All signs are there that (Gnutella 2) is one strictly commercially driven undertaking/experiment (possibly by a very large company pulling all the strings from behind) and that somebody wants to experiment with his own network attached to one that is already up and functional.
"fungusbuttocks": I am another who is against Mike's use of the "Gnutella 2" name, because he simply did it as a marketing strategy (...)
If Mike releases a nicely documented unambiguous protocol doc when he's finished testing the beta, and the protocol appears to have some sort of mathematical merit to it, we should support the protocol.
Looks like the situation's less one-sided than the writeup makes it seem.
One of my biggest beefs about the Gnutella network is that, in general, there doesn't seem to be enough checking to determine whether or not specific hosts are still active. If I run Gnutella for a few hours to get some files, then shut it off for a week, I'm still getting hit with thousands of download requests per day a week later.
It seems like none of the popular servents give a damn that they've gotten an RST packet for each of the last 10,000 requests for file X from servent Y. They just keep plugging blindly away trying to get the file, and worse, some of the servents now store incompleted download data between sessions and resume their blind download attempts the next time the program is run. So this issue is no longer solved by natural transiency of nodes!
I feel sorry for the dialup users who dial in and wind up getting the IP address of someone who was sharing stuff on Gnutella a few hours ago (or even a week ago). Must be impossible to use such a connection.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
1) The developers opposing Gnutella2 seem to be the LimeWire developers (their client is open-source under the GPL see www.limewire.org), gtk-gnutella (GPL as well, see gtk-gnutella.sf.net) and BearShare (not open-source). So calling this a war between free and commercial is stupid, especially since Shareaza IS NOT open-source.
2) LimeWire and the other opposed Gnutella2 for a variety of reasons. They didn't want a new message format where the old would still work, they preferred the GUESS search algorithm over the Gnutella2 search and they said they would not accept the name because if there ever was a Gnutella2 it should be announced by the whole GDF (Gnutella Developer Forum) and not by a single developer.
3) After Shareaza developer Mike Stokes has shown an attitude towards the GDF that could very well be called hostile, things got a little out of hand. The GDF now demands that Mike hands the Gnutella2.com domain to the people running Gnutella.com. Mike won't do so and Raphael Manfraedi (gtk-gnutella) has even proposed to start blocking gnutella2 enabled clients.
4) Shareaza fan's like the one who posted this news story helped a great deal to create the current situation by flaming on the GDF, posting rumors and lies (like Shareaza had 80k-100k users - even Mike Stokes denied that) on various news sites and in gnutella-centric forums.
5) The Gnutella2 protocol is still an undocumented proprietary extension.
Kazaa is based on the concept of "supernodes"... computers which have high resources keep track of info about the "little guys" in their neighbourhood. When you do a querry, you're really only querrying the supernodes directly.... makes for great bandwidth savings exactly where they are needed.
I think that given the fact that bandwidth of internet users vary by a factor of a 1000 or more (compare a 33.6 kbps modem to a 100Mbps ethernet), any network (like Gnutella) which treats all computers the same way isn't going to perform very well.
Also, gnutella is almost defenseless against DOS attacks... because it uses flooding (thereby allowing an attacker to instantly turn one packet into thousands or millions). I don't know enough about Kazaa implementations to know how well it resists DOS attacks....
What I don't understand is why everyone actually talks about `gnutella2' here. There are many different P2P protocols
available. This guy named his gnutella2 and now we should believe it actually is the second version of the gnutella protocol?
Shouldn't we have a discussion about what makes a good protocol before adopting it as a (pseudo)standard?
In this context I'm afraid the commercial vendors might have a point.
Free vs. Commercial...?
And when has commercial ever won out to free when it comes to file sharing, music specifically? Doesn't mean they're not welcome to try, but if history is any indication, somebody is on the wrong side of the profit-8ball (spyware and banner adverts not withstanding, of course...)
You need a FREE iPod Nano
1. Compression of gnutella peer/ultrapeer/leaf traffic a la zlib. (my little cablemodem that used to be able to support up to 110 connections now supports up to 290 connections as ultrapeer with compressed streams.) Proposed and implemented first by gtk-gnutella. However LimeWire is also using some form of compression. 2. Tigertree hashing - tigertree, as well as e-donkey2k, sha1 and md5 hashes (i believe) are all supported. Not sure if shazaa actually verifies each chunk against the tigertree, but it _should_. md4/md5 hashes won't be used by others because it creates a huge redundancy. If you have two files, one with a md4 has the other one with a sha-1 hash you can't make sure if they have the same content or not. As far as tigertree hashing is concerned, nobody ever said it wouldn't be implemented after it was proposed by Gordon Mohr. LimeWire has it on their to-do list for example. 3. Ultrapeer "crawling" via udp queries. Even that was decided to be used before Gnutella2 was released. My problem is, that Mike Stokes knew those features would be implemented but he didn't take part in the discussion, he kept his ideas for himself to be the first one implementing them. The GDF was productive (it produces the proposals more quickly then the GDF members are implementing them). Shareaza hasn't (yet) broken the existing gnetwork. The way you say it, it sounds like that is just a matter of time. - By the way, Shareaza is sending corrupt alternate locations, so it is breaking the network.
That's just great. Yes, by doing things alone, just for yourself, you don't have to wait for others to agree. But then how do you ensure your ideas will be inter-operable with others? This approach can only work in a single-vendor world.
You sound fairly ignorant about the current state of Gnutella. Compression is not something new, it has been implemented for almost six months by gtk-gnutella and Swapper (at least, forgive me if I forgot another vendor).
This is exactly what LimeWire's GUESS proposal is about yet. But LimeWire, contrary to Shareaza, has discussed the matter openly before implementing it, taking the feedback of most developers.
I could not say for Shareaza, since I don't use it, but I looked at the source code of Gnucleus and I can tell you there are many things that are not standard within Gnucleus. Yet Gnucleus currently behaves as a decent Gnutella client.
To summarize, I think your post is more pro-Shareaza (blindly) than well-informed. I'm not sure you fully grasp what is at stake here.
What I'm trying to understand is why does everybody and their brother build a brand new P2P network (or try to)? What's the point? There's exactly $0 to be made off of it. More network just mean that each one is not as good, since files are spread out across multiple networks, not just one. Kazaalite works just fine. Why switch? 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".
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
First of all, if this is "open" (free) versus "closed" (commercial), WHERE is the Gnutella 2 specification? "It's coming". I mean that's one of the oldest notions in the free software community, it is NOT open source (or protocol) until the source (or protocol) is actually open! When (if) the specs come out, I'll believe it.
Currently the Gnutella "1" (aka v0.6) specs are published, and functioning in many clients, and the Gnutella 2 protocol is not to be found anywhere. It's true that Shareaza does not (yet) have ads and Limewire and Bearshare do, but Shareaza's source is closed, unlike Limewire's. Calling Shareaza open and free and Limewire closed and commercial is kind of silly, especially since Shareaza source is closed and Shareaza G2 protocol is (currently) closed.
Second of all, Gnutella is a coalition of the most popular Gnutella developers - Limewire, Bearshare, Gnucleus, Xolox, GTK-Gnutella, Morpheus (sort of) and so forth. Currently, they call the Gnutella version they have version 0.6. Along comes a new client Shareaza, and they try to hijack the Gnutella name and call it "Gnutella 2".
I hope Mike comes to his senses. Shareaza is a decent p2p client, and has been a positive thing for Gnutella, and he can do what he wants, but I am uninterested in any new protocol until protocol specifications are published, and trying to seize the Gnutella name is kind of silly as well, especially since the protocol he wrote (and has yet to share specifications of) is so radically different than Gnutella. He can switch to his new protocol if he wants, but he should stop calling it an open protocol until he publishes the specifications, and he should consider a name aside from "Gnutella 2".
GNU Internet File Transfer
http://gift.sourceforge.net/
" What is giFT, you ask? giFT is a modular daemon capable of abstracting the communication between the end user and specific filesharing protocols (peer-to-peer or otherwise). The giFT project differs from many other similar projects in that it is a distribution of a standalone (platform-independent) daemon, a library for client/frontend development, and our own homegrown network OpenFT. "
This is a great network, where you find many oggs, downloads actually work (up to 600kb/s!!) and finding files is really fast. Lots of altruists are using it. Plus: You have to compile it from CVS, which prevents idiots from using the network. On the average each user shares 8 GB!
Moritz
The anti-G2 lot isn't just lacking reason, they're contradicting it. They would cut off their nose to spite their face (or Mike Stokes). This is the mentality we're dealing with:
"...as long as gnutella2.com exists in its current form, you are all fifty cent whores that got pimped by Slimy Mike."
Childish and spiteful. This is not the attitude with which to reach compromise and solve problems. Name calling? Are we freakin' twelve?
In the end, the G2 opponents are being obstinately selfish, and the heated, illogical emotion they're injecting into this discussion is hurting far more than helping the community by delaying the widespread implementation and deployment of a superior protocol that has already been tested and used effectively in public hands.
I don't care what anyone personally thinks of Mike, his opinions, or how he's handled the unleashing of Shareaza on the world. The only working reason in this argument is the Gnutella2 mark, and the G2 opponents seem to be desperately clinging to it, as if this is the only way they can oppose G2 without showing their true feelings, which I suspect have to do either with personal conflicts such as Shareaza stepping on the feet of other Gnutella players. Surely its a sign that the Loud Voices complain that G2 will only cause a schism, but then turn around and talk about Gnutella3 as a way of battling G2. Would I be wrong to construe this as an indicator of where certain peoples' intentions really lie?
The G2 opponents are so busy thinking of creative ways to sanction Shareaza and Mike Stokes that they've not given a single thought to what course of action would most benefit the community of users in this situation. As a Gnutella user and developer, I say this spurious, wasteful behaviour must stop now before it gets any worse. I suggest they regain their emotional composure and grow the hell up.
For me, this is an awkward situation. I'm a proponent of all things open and Free, and I should support the GDF in this conflict else violate my principles. But my principles also encompass the proper behavior of a rationally thinking human being who wants to successfully communicate with others of his kind. In this regard, I find the behaviour of some GDF key players to be so repulsive that I like myself less when I support a protocol backed by propaganda-spewing, egotistical drama queens than when I support a protocol that's only quasi-open, or less, as is currently the case. (I _really_ hope Mike opens up G2. It would be such a graceful way of pulling the rug out from under these fools, and beyond that I don't know how long I can endure taking sides here without having an ethical melt-down.)
Niko
PS
Replace the phrase 'G2 opponents' with the name 'Vinnie', who seems to think calling people 'slimey' and 'imbicile' demonstrate one's argumentative superiority. His contradictions of logic, hypocrisy, personal attacks on the character of those making neutral observations or expressing neutral opinions, all serve as wonderful examples of how not to effectively influence people or raise support for a cause. He's like a politician who's election campaign consists of insulting the mothers of his constituents.
> All of this is a moot point. Mike wont change the name, no one here
> can make him. Get over it. This is so rediculously unimportant in
> the scheme of things I hate to see so much list traffic dedicated to
> it.
Amen.
"John Marshall has made his decision. Now let's see him enforce it."
--sdem
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Gnutella Developers Front?
=p
Gnutella has implemented a system similar to the Kazaa supernodes. Someone suffering a severe case of oxymoronism dubbed them "ultrapeers". It doesn't fully cache the inferior node content like Kazaa, but it does keep a giant hash table for each "leaf node". (Oxymorons are best when flavored with mixed metaphor.) The ultrapeers shield the leaf nodes from most of the query traffic, routing to the leaf node only the queries that appear to have a high likelihood of being successful.
There are still people using older versions of modern clients and some antiquated clients are still in use, but most of the gnutella network has moved away from the "all computers are the same" model.
The new protocol implemented by Shareaza (and hopefully by several other open-minded developers) provides for an exhaustive search of the entire network using a combination of direct client-to-hub and hub-to-hub communication. The hubs and clients can both still communicate with standard gnutella ultrapeers (and regular peers if one desires), so there is full integration of the new protocol with the old.
The new protocol is much more resistant to DOS attacks because queries do not flood the network. Also, a client must establish a trust relationship with each hub with which it intends to communicate. This won't prevent a DOS attack, but it will most certainly slow it down.
Limewire has a GPL version at www.limewire.org. There is no spyware in it. You can always checkout the lastest CVS version, compile it and use it. I do.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
giFT just has not yet had a stable release, even though it works very good already. In the long run, I expect it to be able to support the 10s of thousands of users kazaa or gnutella have. In fact just try it, you'd be surprised.
/..
Also, from the fact that you use kazaa, I presume, that you use windows, which is not an option for me. In fact it makes you look like a fool on
Moritz
Mike has said on numerous occasions that he will release the G2 protocol when it is finished. Since the protocol is still in beta and being changed, it's still not finshed. When he works out the bugs and makes it as good as it can be, it will be released.
If the proposed protocol is entirely new, why unilaterally declare it the new Gnutella protocol by calling it Gnutella2? What if I propose something that is called Gnutella3 and is crap, from a technical point of view (I don't suggest Gnutella2 is)?
If the protocol is really that good, why not give it an entirely new name and let it become popular by its technical merits?
Just as the Limewire and Bearshare developers shouldn't be the ones to decide what becomes the next Gnutella, nobody else should do that on their own.
I strongly doubt that "Gnutella" is trademarked as a P2P name by anyone involved, so lawsuits are not an issue.
May we never see th
If you had read the venom pouring forth from some members of the_gdf you'd realize "bitter" is a rather severe understatement. There are definitely some egotistical kids involved in all this, but I think your labelling has been misdirected.
I've worked on gtk-gnutella with Raphael Manfretti, and while I haven't been in touch with him for a bit, your comment sort of stopped me cold.
Raphael and the other main developers have put *huge* amounts of time into developing and *carefully documenting* a protocol that's pretty backwards compatible. They've been in contact with each other to ensure that their clients work well, and are one of the more impressive examples of competitors working together for everyone's good.
Now, after all this work to avoid protocol fragmentation, one guy makes a new protocol. He uses some work from existing members, and refuses to publish any specifications. He then *takes* the name from this project that has seen *so* much work to be open (because he wants to grab a bit more PR and a few more $$$), and uses it.
Now, these developers are, more than understandably, frusterated. This leads to lots of end-user confusion. It's bad for *everyone involved*. Had Make said "I'm making a new protocol and calling it Sharella" or something, it would have been okay. But he created incompatibility, *he* refused to publish specs to let other developers remedy that, and *he* is out trying to profit off the users of the network.
So, I have to disagree. I've seen a lot of Raph's writing, and while sometimes he turns something down, he acts a lot more mature than, say, Linus does.
Your criticism of him is unfounded.
May we never see th
This is more like a newcommer trying to trump everybody out they by comming up with a new incompatible proto and shouting "New Gnutell 2.0, now even better than ever".
The people that moderated your commented your comment up