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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."
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.
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.