The Gnutella War: Free vs. Commercial 137
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."
why should I care? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad communications == bad blood (Score:4, Insightful)
"The GDF's first reaction was negative because they claimed it used the same ideas from other proposals. Once the protocol specs were released this was obviously false, but the GDFs reaction was still negative so Mike has not bothered to release the rest of the specs.
What it really sounds like is that the commercial entities are balking for something. That is, they are negotiating with their veto.What specifically they want out of this, whether it is a voice in the process or perhaps a cut of the action, I'm not entirely clear. I'd like more on what the author of the article called the 'backstory'.
Re:Kazaa (Score:2, Insightful)
I think that given the fact that bandwidth of internet users vary by a factor of a 1000 or more (compare a 33.6 kbps modem to a 100Mbps ethernet), any network (like Gnutella) which treats all computers the same way isn't going to perform very well.
Also, gnutella is almost defenseless against DOS attacks... because it uses flooding (thereby allowing an attacker to instantly turn one packet into thousands or millions). I don't know enough about Kazaa implementations to know how well it resists DOS attacks....
Re:Why Shazaa is so great (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why Shazaa is so great (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
who died and made GDF king? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not a Shareaza fan, But I think Mike is within his rights to call his protocol Gnutella2 if he wishes.
I've been following this thing for a while now and this is my view. Gnutella was made by a group of developers at nullsoft, right? They never trademarked the name and eventually abandoned the technology all together, I believe.
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.
The GDF should accept this, realize that at any time someone can create a 'Gnutellan' and all the GDF need to do is that when describing their protocols, specify the version that they created and/or endorse. eg 0.6, etc.
Re:The question is... (Score:2, Insightful)
IANAD (developer) (Score:2, Insightful)
First of all, if this is "open" (free) versus "closed" (commercial), WHERE is the Gnutella 2 specification? "It's coming". I mean that's one of the oldest notions in the free software community, it is NOT open source (or protocol) until the source (or protocol) is actually open! When (if) the specs come out, I'll believe it.
Currently the Gnutella "1" (aka v0.6) specs are published, and functioning in many clients, and the Gnutella 2 protocol is not to be found anywhere. It's true that Shareaza does not (yet) have ads and Limewire and Bearshare do, but Shareaza's source is closed, unlike Limewire's. Calling Shareaza open and free and Limewire closed and commercial is kind of silly, especially since Shareaza source is closed and Shareaza G2 protocol is (currently) closed.
Second of all, Gnutella is a coalition of the most popular Gnutella developers - Limewire, Bearshare, Gnucleus, Xolox, GTK-Gnutella, Morpheus (sort of) and so forth. Currently, they call the Gnutella version they have version 0.6. Along comes a new client Shareaza, and they try to hijack the Gnutella name and call it "Gnutella 2".
I hope Mike comes to his senses. Shareaza is a decent p2p client, and has been a positive thing for Gnutella, and he can do what he wants, but I am uninterested in any new protocol until protocol specifications are published, and trying to seize the Gnutella name is kind of silly as well, especially since the protocol he wrote (and has yet to share specifications of) is so radically different than Gnutella. He can switch to his new protocol if he wants, but he should stop calling it an open protocol until he publishes the specifications, and he should consider a name aside from "Gnutella 2".
Re:The bystander's conclusion. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Seems to be two reasons. One is, the new protocol is (at this date) proprietary and not open, though it is being heavily marketed. There are promises that it will be open, some day.
The other reason is that they're seriously annoyed that the new protocol was named "Gnutella2", which implies that it is superior to Gnutella. Maybe it is, but naming it thus was a marketing coup at the expense of personal relations with the other developers. Kind of like calling your linux distribution "ImprovedRedHat" even though it never was RedHat to begin with.
Re:How many networks? (Score:3, Insightful)
What I'm trying to understand is why does everybody and their brother build a brand new P2P network (or try to)? 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".
What Gnutella is trying to do is make an open, operable standard which then can be implemented by many clients, thus simultaneously making all of those clients better, and therefore making so that even though there are many clients, the network they are on is good.
In a sense P2P networks are similar to encryption methods. New compression methods will constantly be discovered. The reason why people choose to use them even though it will break compatiblity with old clients is that they're better (smaller, faster, etc...). P2P is at the same stage compression methods were 10 years ago. Some people come up with new P2P networks as an academic exercise. Others implement them because they are better than what they have. Your argument may make sense 10 years from now when the P2P process is nearly optimized (similar to compression now), and then, the more people we have sharing one network, the better. However, when there is signifcant room for improvement, it is always better to implement the new standards instead of trying to maintain compatibility with the old ones.
Re:why should I care? (Score:2, Insightful)
Suppose you DO in fact want to find an MPeg of a dog or something (for whatever reason). The file sharing protocals ARE so overwhelmed with copyrighted material it is becoming next to impossible to find public domain material. Pirates are hurting the file sharing services from both directions.
Re:You're missing the point... (Score:2, Insightful)