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."

Re:Gnutella2 Looked at By CS Research Community?

[jrs 1]

all i know is that i'm using it and it's better (and free-er) than kazaa which was my previous best p2p program.

Re:Gnutella2 Looked at By CS Research Community?

[InfiniteWisdom]

I disagree... Kazaa works far better for me and for most people I know...

Re:Gnutella2 Looked at By CS Research Community?

[InfiniteWisdom]

Gnutella basically uses flooding (limited by some TTL)... basically the network expends a large effort to execute queries, and you still don't query all of the network (or even necessarily a very large part of it)

Gnutella might work OKish if you're connected by a fat-enough pipe, but otherwise it does very poorly.

This is a huge beat-up

[darkov]

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.

No, I think they mean commercial.

[Motherfucking Shit]

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.

The dissenting opinions

[flopsy mopsalon]

The whole controversy over Gnutella 2 is being hashed out over on the GDF message boards. Basically, complaints are that Mike is coopting the Gnutella name for his own benefit, and is not bieng forthcoming with the details of the protocol. Some quotes:

Raphael Manfred: [yahoo.com] "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": [yahoo.com] 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": [yahoo.com] 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.

Some clarification

[John W. Lindh]

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.

Profit? Dream on.

[Mulletproof]

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...)

Re:The question is...

[nick-less]

Well maybe the proposed protocol just wasn't very good?

I just tried their beta and must say: it might not be perfect, but its alot better than standard gnutella.

How many networks?

[NineNine]

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".

Re:Gnutella2 Looked at By CS Research Community?

[jilles]

Kazaa has one huge problem for me: large downloads invariably corrupt. That doesn't really matter for movies since it just means you have a few seconds of distorted sound/picture. However, if you're downloading things that need to be 100% intact like (cough) a linux iso (cough) it is very convenient if the p2p client bothers to verify that what it is downloading is the same as that should be downloaded.

Shareaza solves this problem, kazaa doesn't. However, the shareaza network is so small currently that there isn't much to download. With 3 million users at any time, the Kazaa network is unbeatable in that respect.

Re:How many networks?

[Snaller]

Kazaalite works just fine. Why switch?

Yeah, the authorities love it too, its soo easy to find your IP number and slap a fine on you.

Re:Kazaa

[patchmaster]

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.

Re:The ral problem

[richieb]

Do you know certainly that both servents ... BearShare and LimeWire ... are not completely free ... both are full of ad/spyware (in free version).

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.

Wrong. Mike is much more at fault than that.

[0x0d0a]

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.