But anti-patent lobbyists are not necessary Open Source code writers. Think about a small software business, who will be selling its products, and which will therefore contribute to generating cash flows. Do you really think that this small business selling its product will not be infringing hundreds of patents already filled-in by the big corporations?
And should that small business come up with a really nice idea that could deserve a patent, chances are that this patent will not be enforcible against big corporations (who will surely find that company already infringing some of the patents in its portfolio) but only against other small businesses who compete on the same market. Thereby killing competition early when it should on the contrary be promoted!
Maybe all the Open Source authors are anti-patent lobbyists, but that is not the sole population who should be fighting against that system!
The purpose of the patent system in the indusrty is to grant one the right of acting as a "monopoly" for a limited amount of time, in return for the invention being disclosed. In a competitive industry, this is the way of gaining a competitive advantage, and it is indeed the motor of invention, because if they don't innovate, competitors won't gain a competitive advantage.
This does not transpose well to the software industry because it is already a world dominated by giants who already have tons of patents for silly things. The one-click patent from Amazon is a good example of how deviant the system can become... Not even talking about whether the idea itself was an invention or not, it gives an unfair competitive advantage to Amazon because it is applicable to the way of conducting business on the Internet and not to the business in which Amazon is competing.
It's smarter to scare uploaders than downloaders, because if there's a shortage of uploaders, downloaders will have a bad experience with the network...
However, you must be aware that with what is called "partial file sharing" (on Gnutella at least, don't know how it's called on FastTrack), every downloader is a potential uploader for the chunks he already downloaded.
It helps spreading files out, but it means downloaders can become uploaders and therefore are not safe either!
Sorry for being pedantic, but LimeWire is not a network. It's the name of a Gnutella client. Since Gnutella is an open protocol, there are numerous clients for it.
GTKG cannot really be called a legitimate voice in the "war" because their client is very outdated. It doesn't even support Ultrapeers.
Your idea of legitimate needs revisiting. By the same line of reasonning, all the clients that do not support Mike's Protocol are very outdated and do not have the right to voice their opinion?
Any developer wishing to start a Gnutella servent today will necessarily have a lot of work to do, and his servent will be outdated right from the start. You would also want this developer to shut up until he has at least as many features as the others?
What Gnutella client are you developing yourself exactly? You're not even a Gnutella developer, so why are you voicing your opinion about things you obviously do not control, and perhaps don't even fully grasp?
The truth is that the commercial developers are mad that Shareaza is freeware and has better features. The commercial clients suck in comparison to Shareaza 1.7b and Gnucleus.
Come on, Anonymous Coward, do not confuse things as if you were a clueless beginner.
We're talking about the Gnutella protocol here, not the other esoteric features surrounding it, like for instance the user interface.
I've been told Shareaza's UI is nice, but I have friends who just swear by BearShare's interface. This is a totally different issue, a matter of taste mainly. Let's only focus on the Gnutella protocol in this discussion, because it is what is at stake. Personally, I do not care much about the UI.
.and it makes me sick beyond words that the GDF would actually advocate blocking or lower the service priority of Shareaza clients.
You're wrong here. Noone is suggesting to block Shareaza in particular. That would be against my own ethics.
Instead, I'm advocating for the ombilical between the Gnutella network and Mike's network to be cut. That is, I don't want to discriminate against a particular servent but against a feature that is not necessarily welcome, i.e. ones that support Mike's Protocol.
It's only a proposal for now, and the fact that Shareaza is the only servent implementing Mike's Protocol is due to the closed nature of that protocol.
The reason I'm in favor of drawing the line between the two is because of its closed nature, there is no telling how Mike's Protocol will evolve. It could end-up messing up with the Gnutella network carelessly.
Interestingly, the last update to the RFC-Gnutella draft was about six months ago now, and the last post to the mailing list (mine if I'm not mistaken) wasn't long after that. Standardization doesn't seem to be a very high priority around there.
Being the one who launched the RFC-Gnutella effort, I must respond to your post to clear out any misunderstanding about the project.
First, the goal of RFC-Gnutella is to document the existing protocol, not to use it as a vehicle to submit enhancements. That is, the document should only reflect existing practices. If you have ideas for enhancements, the GDF is the place for discussing them.
Second, the RFC-Gnutella project is a free project done by volunteers. The fact that it is not advancing is due to lack of manpower. Tor did a wonderful job at putting up almost 80% of the existing draft. I can only regret that he remained the most important contributor.
I myself should contribute more to this project, but my own Gnutella servent is getting late behing the GDF proposals (i.e. the GDF moves faster than I can react), and therefore, my priority goes to my servent, not the RFC-Gnutella project.
Anyone with decent writing skills in English and who is interested into getting a standard RFC-like document for the Gnutella protocol is welcome to join the project and contribute.
Just count how many search results you get from Shareaza.
This does not mean anything and you know it.
Why? Because LimeWire's GUESS is not widely deployed on Gnutella yet.
Also, GUESS is forcefully limiting the amount of results you get, to about 200 per search. Therefore, comparing the amount of search results is not directly meaningful.
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.
If by rights you mean legal rights, then you're probably right.
However, just because something is OK legally does not make it necessarily right morally and ethically. There isn't a law for every situation you will face in your life, nonetheless you will have to take some decisions. And those decisions are based on your ethics.
By using the Gnutella 2 moniker, Mike probably initially made a mistake (although I think it was a carefully thought out move, but I have no proof), and he should have rectified immediately when the GDF reacted.
The fact that he did not says a lot about his values.
***The developer(s) don't wait for committee to implement backwards-compatible extensions to the protocols***
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.
1. Compression of gnutella peer/ultrapeer/leaf traffic a la zlib.
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).
3. Ultrapeer "crawling" via udp queries.
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.
Gnucleus and Shareaza have been the best gnutella peer apps on the windows side because they
1) implement new features and new standards promptly,
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.
The problem is that you cannot see the merits of Mike's Protocol (MP for short) since some Shareaza Ultrapeers are talking to both MP and Gnutella.
It's hard to know the exact level of bridging achieved between MP and Gnutella, but the fact that this bridging exists at all means that whatever wonders you can claim MP has are tainted by the fact MP uses Gnutella to bootstrap.
That's why I'm advocating you stop this bridging and play with your MP-net for a while. Then we'll be able to compare the relative merits of the two networks.
And no, simply disabling Gnutella support from your servent is not good enough. Someone else among MP-net may be doing the bridging even if you are not.
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But anti-patent lobbyists are not necessary Open Source code writers. Think about a small software business, who will be selling its products, and which will therefore contribute to generating cash flows. Do you really think that this small business selling its product will not be infringing hundreds of patents already filled-in by the big corporations?
And should that small business come up with a really nice idea that could deserve a patent, chances are that this patent will not be enforcible against big corporations (who will surely find that company already infringing some of the patents in its portfolio) but only against other small businesses who compete on the same market. Thereby killing competition early when it should on the contrary be promoted!
Maybe all the Open Source authors are anti-patent lobbyists, but that is not the sole population who should be fighting against that system!
The purpose of the patent system in the indusrty is to grant one the right of acting as a "monopoly" for a limited amount of time, in return for the invention being disclosed. In a competitive industry, this is the way of gaining a competitive advantage, and it is indeed the motor of invention, because if they don't innovate, competitors won't gain a competitive advantage.
This does not transpose well to the software industry because it is already a world dominated by giants who already have tons of patents for silly things. The one-click patent from Amazon is a good example of how deviant the system can become... Not even talking about whether the idea itself was an invention or not, it gives an unfair competitive advantage to Amazon because it is applicable to the way of conducting business on the Internet and not to the business in which Amazon is competing.
It's smarter to scare uploaders than downloaders, because if there's a shortage of uploaders, downloaders will have a bad experience with the network...
However, you must be aware that with what is called "partial file sharing" (on Gnutella at least, don't know how it's called on FastTrack), every downloader is a potential uploader for the chunks he already downloaded.
It helps spreading files out, but it means downloaders can become uploaders and therefore are not safe either!
Sorry for being pedantic, but LimeWire is not a network. It's the name of a Gnutella client. Since Gnutella is an open protocol, there are numerous clients for it.
Your idea of legitimate needs revisiting. By the same line of reasonning, all the clients that do not support Mike's Protocol are very outdated and do not have the right to voice their opinion?
Any developer wishing to start a Gnutella servent today will necessarily have a lot of work to do, and his servent will be outdated right from the start. You would also want this developer to shut up until he has at least as many features as the others?
What Gnutella client are you developing yourself exactly? You're not even a Gnutella developer, so why are you voicing your opinion about things you obviously do not control, and perhaps don't even fully grasp?
Come on, Anonymous Coward, do not confuse things as if you were a clueless beginner.
We're talking about the Gnutella protocol here, not the other esoteric features surrounding it, like for instance the user interface.
I've been told Shareaza's UI is nice, but I have friends who just swear by BearShare's interface. This is a totally different issue, a matter of taste mainly. Let's only focus on the Gnutella protocol in this discussion, because it is what is at stake. Personally, I do not care much about the UI.
You're wrong here. Noone is suggesting to block Shareaza in particular. That would be against my own ethics.
Instead, I'm advocating for the ombilical between the Gnutella network and Mike's network to be cut. That is, I don't want to discriminate against a particular servent but against a feature that is not necessarily welcome, i.e. ones that support Mike's Protocol.
It's only a proposal for now, and the fact that Shareaza is the only servent implementing Mike's Protocol is due to the closed nature of that protocol.
The reason I'm in favor of drawing the line between the two is because of its closed nature, there is no telling how Mike's Protocol will evolve. It could end-up messing up with the Gnutella network carelessly.
Being the one who launched the RFC-Gnutella effort, I must respond to your post to clear out any misunderstanding about the project.
First, the goal of RFC-Gnutella is to document the existing protocol, not to use it as a vehicle to submit enhancements. That is, the document should only reflect existing practices. If you have ideas for enhancements, the GDF is the place for discussing them.
Second, the RFC-Gnutella project is a free project done by volunteers. The fact that it is not advancing is due to lack of manpower. Tor did a wonderful job at putting up almost 80% of the existing draft. I can only regret that he remained the most important contributor.
I myself should contribute more to this project, but my own Gnutella servent is getting late behing the GDF proposals (i.e. the GDF moves faster than I can react), and therefore, my priority goes to my servent, not the RFC-Gnutella project.
Anyone with decent writing skills in English and who is interested into getting a standard RFC-like document for the Gnutella protocol is welcome to join the project and contribute.
This does not mean anything and you know it.
Why? Because LimeWire's GUESS is not widely deployed on Gnutella yet. Also, GUESS is forcefully limiting the amount of results you get, to about 200 per search. Therefore, comparing the amount of search results is not directly meaningful.
If by rights you mean legal rights, then you're probably right.
However, just because something is OK legally does not make it necessarily right morally and ethically. There isn't a law for every situation you will face in your life, nonetheless you will have to take some decisions. And those decisions are based on your ethics.
By using the Gnutella 2 moniker, Mike probably initially made a mistake (although I think it was a carefully thought out move, but I have no proof), and he should have rectified immediately when the GDF reacted.
The fact that he did not says a lot about his values.
OpenFT is another protocol. Whether it's better or worse than *tella is another debate, and is not the point of this discussion.
Gnutella is not the only P2P protocol out there, but it is the only one I know that is both open, multi-vendor, and decentralized.
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.
The problem is that you cannot see the merits of Mike's Protocol (MP for short) since some Shareaza Ultrapeers are talking to both MP and Gnutella.
It's hard to know the exact level of bridging achieved between MP and Gnutella, but the fact that this bridging exists at all means that whatever wonders you can claim MP has are tainted by the fact MP uses Gnutella to bootstrap.
That's why I'm advocating you stop this bridging and play with your MP-net for a while. Then we'll be able to compare the relative merits of the two networks.
And no, simply disabling Gnutella support from your servent is not good enough. Someone else among MP-net may be doing the bridging even if you are not.