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P2P Services Speak Out Against Gnutella2

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the i-want-my-p2p dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Three leading Gnultella services voice their opinions on Gnutella2 or Mike's Protocol as they refer to it as. None of the three recognize Gnutella2 as true Gnutella and worry its propritary protocol will divide the Gnutella community. In the first interview Vincent Falco of BearShare contributes his thoughts. The second interview gets input from Greg Blidson of LimeWire, and Arno Steenbekkers from XoloX."

10 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. Since Napster is dead.... by Economist · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... P2P is already divided in too many protocols and such.

    1. Re:Since Napster is dead.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Diversity is a GOOD thing in the climate of M/RIAA.

      Expect a defacto standard...

      MS p2p SDK

  2. Re:How does one "block" hostile clients? by 1nv4d3r · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Any client can lie in the next upgrade, so a good option is usually to block based on behavior. In other words, no matter what client you claim to be, if you send me more than x requests/second for longer than y minutes, you're disconnected.

    The other benefit of rules like this is that you don't discriminate one bad client; you discriminate against actions that hurt the network. As long as it plays nice any client is fine.

  3. I think that it's reasonable, though by 0x0d0a · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For a protocol where the peers matter so much, Gnutella works surprisingly well. That's been because the developers worked together very much to keep things going properly and sharing improvements ahead of time to let everyone adapt.

    Shareaza broke that.

    It doesn't really *matter* as much as these people make it out to be, because almost nobody *uses* the damn client, but it's really stupid that they took the "Gnutella 2" name, which really is deserved by the coalition of developers that shared and worked together.

    --
    May we never see th
    1. Re:I think that it's reasonable, though by Wonko42 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Shareaza broke nothing. Have you used Shareaza? It has an excellent implementation of both Gnutella 0.6 (which every other client uses) and its own Gnutella2 protocol. You can use them both at the same time, meaning that you're a part of both networks. Nothing is being broken. Other Gnutella users get the benefit of your file collection (and vice versa), and other Shareaza users get the same benefit but without the scaling issues (and vice versa).

      Of course it was a daft move for Mike to call it Gnutella2, but so what? The guy had written a damn good protocol based on Gnutella, and a rose, by any other name, is still a goddamn rose.

    2. Re:I think that it's reasonable, though by Herr_Nightingale · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Gnutella is broken, as anybody comparing FastTrack to (your choice of Gnutella servant here) can attest. It's slow, downloads have a completion rate that is barely usable, and even advances like swarmed downloads don't work very well. Here, try this.. Kazaa Lite is the clean version of Kazaa. Then try this. Limewire is relatively popular, and wholly commercial.
      You can post your findings here.

      I've tried Shareaza too, and it's faster and has a nicer interface than the other Gnutella servants. It's not, however, on a level with Kazaa yet.
      You'll notice that this whole debate over the legitimacy of Gnutella2 (or Mike's Protocol, as Vinnie likes to call it) has two distinct sides: on the one hand, you've got the COMMERCIAL developers, including Vinnie Falco, LimeWire, and Xolox; on the other hand, you've got Mike Stokes and Gnucleus.

      What this article fails to mention is that the registration of Gnutella2.com is the real issue at stake. The commercial interests are pissy because they've been one-upped by an upstart, as they see it.

      Gnutella 2 is deservedly named, and clearing away the cruft was the only way to improve Gnutella. Mike Stokes clobbered the adware vendors with Shareaza, and did what they were all afraid to do: start fresh, start clean, and start out on a level with the current state of the art P2P applications currently available. I applaud the guy for having such guts. He registered the name, and he deserves to keep it. F*ck the spyware perpetrators.

  4. Is there another free client? by Jay+Maynard · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I use Shareaza because it doesn't bundle any adware, doesn't bundle any spyware, and doesn't do anything but file sharing. BearShare still has adware in it. Are there other clients that don't include the crap and still provide the function? (And no, I haven't touched the timeout settings, nor do I intend to.)

    FWIW, BearShare's complaining seems motivated at least in part by the fact that Shareaza is out there potentially taking away its revenues...

    --
    Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
  5. Re:ShareReactor. by soupdevil · · Score: 2, Insightful

    eMule is not a bad client, and currently there's a lot of interesting content on the donkey network. But central servers will be the death of any P2P network. FastTrack is already secretly negotiating the terms of their own demise with Hollywood. The donkey network will be next.

    Only serverless p2p has a chance to survive long enough to develop enough non-infringing users to withstand the lawsuits. Right now Gnutella, Gnutella 2 and Overnet are our only choices. My money (and my own content) is on G2.

    Check out www.leeware.com for non-infringing content available through the G2 network. And check out www.sharelive.com for a G2 site similar to ShareReactor.

  6. This is how MS is going to conquer P2P by thehunger · · Score: 2, Insightful
    In 6-12 months from now, if anybody asks how Microsoft managed to conquer the P2P marked so fast, simply point them back to this thread to show them the state of quibbling between all the other players.

    What they should have done is gang up against Microsoft with open standards and inventive forward thinking and not simply try to use P2P as a scheme to get rich quickly.

  7. My Experience by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I used to use Limewire all the time, but it was written in Java so it was (a) slow and (b) had its own set of menu/window widgets, which made it a pain to use. The only files I ever found were popular music that I didn't need, Futurama episodes (okay - that part was good), and faked porn files that had links to paysites encoded inside.

    I switch to Shareaza. It's small. First thing I notice is that the user interface is GREAT. Seriously, you have to be smoking crack to think its user interface is bad. It keeps me informed about my searches, uses the OS' native widgets, is FAST and best of all, I have never seen so many responses to my searches. Whether that is becuase of "Gnutella2" or something else I don't know, and don't care. When you're trying to download movies of Anna Ohura at 3am, you want what works, it's that simple.

    And Shareaza doesn't include spyware crap.