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Shareaza 2.0 Released Under GPL
RageEar writes "Today it was announced that the latest version of Shareaza, a popular P2P application for Windows, was released under the GPL. Currently the source code is hosted by the Shareaza servers, but the announcement makes mention of the code becoming a project on Sourceforge. The binaries are still available for Windows only, but I imagine it is only a matter of time before a Linux port emerges."
Well, Shareaza's protocols were already open; the Gnutella network spec and eDonkey network spec are already documented, even if the code isn't available.
The big boys generally don't look at the data coming over the wire since it's too much of a hassle. It's far easier if they actually participate in the network and then watch who downloads from them.
If you're really paranoid about it, though, you could engineer some crypto into the networks... assuming you can trust your peers and they agree to the same crypto. Security by obscurity of protocol rarely works.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
I beg to differ. Have you ever tried Shareaza? I am not affiliated with either project, and I must say that Shareaza blows other Gnutella clients out of the water.
* The user interface is unmatched, at least on the Windows platform.
* Performance-- LimeWire and Kazaa both suck the crap out of your CPU.
* Support for multiple protocols
* Plugin functionality
The biggest benefit of Shareaza going open source is the inevitable addition of a FastTrack plugin.
You can do 100% of what Shareaza tries to do with LimeWire -- that is, search for and download files. The network it runs on is implementation details. You can in fact say that Shareaza is bloated for adding support for multiple networks instead of making one network work as good as it possibly can.
Bram Cohen has complained that Shareaza's BitTorrent implementation is terrible. Gnutella developers have complained that Shareaza's Gnutella implementation is outdated & that it wrongly sends tons of "Gnutella2" packets to clients that don't want them.
Would you prefer a client that picks a goal and makes it work amazingly well, or a client that tries to do lots of things so-so?
I would prefer an app that allows me to access the multple, fragmented, and previously incompatable, networks used for P2P access today.
Perhaps you only go for the files that have 2000 sources avalaible to connect to, I don't. Having the ability to use all four networks to grab the same file, and not having to worry that if the file drops off the radar on one of the networks that the entire time spent downloading it is wasted is much more important than worrying about whether the developer 'plays well with others'. I could care less if scared cows are being challenged, frankly each and everyone of the 'core' Gnutella developers have tried to hijack the protcol at least once themselved. I could care less if the current implementation of Bittorrent is less than spetacular. It'll get better. What I care about is interopability. Something Limewire has never had.
On the other hand, I currently use eMule. ^_^