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."
The question is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Gnutella2 Looked at By CS Research Community? (Score:2, Interesting)
Has Gnutella2 taken cue from the recent research publications?
Re:The question is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember that these are businesses, so just because He Is Your Brother is no reason to blindly follow his lead. They may well have a totally reasonable, above-board justification.
Re:To get around supposed American law (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Gnutella Protocol Question. (Score:4, Interesting)
One of my biggest beefs about the Gnutella network is that, in general, there doesn't seem to be enough checking to determine whether or not specific hosts are still active. If I run Gnutella for a few hours to get some files, then shut it off for a week, I'm still getting hit with thousands of download requests per day a week later.
It seems like none of the popular servents give a damn that they've gotten an RST packet for each of the last 10,000 requests for file X from servent Y. They just keep plugging blindly away trying to get the file, and worse, some of the servents now store incompleted download data between sessions and resume their blind download attempts the next time the program is run. So this issue is no longer solved by natural transiency of nodes!
I feel sorry for the dialup users who dial in and wind up getting the IP address of someone who was sharing stuff on Gnutella a few hours ago (or even a week ago). Must be impossible to use such a connection.
anyone can call his/her protocol G2. (Score:4, Interesting)
available. This guy named his gnutella2 and now we should believe it actually is the second version of the gnutella protocol?
Shouldn't we have a discussion about what makes a good protocol before adopting it as a (pseudo)standard?
In this context I'm afraid the commercial vendors might have a point.
Why Shazaa is so great (Score:1, Interesting)
***The developer(s) don't wait for committee to implement backwards-compatible extensions to the protocols***
A lot of features that have been proposed and discussed to death on the gdf and here, the Shazaa developer(s) has already made happen!
Some such features:
1. Compression of gnutella peer/ultrapeer/leaf traffic a la zlib. (my little cablemodem that used to be able to support up to 110 connections now supports up to 290 connections as ultrapeer with compressed streams.)
2. Tigertree hashing - tigertree, as well as e-donkey2k, sha1 and md5 hashes (i believe) are all supported. Not sure if shazaa actually verifies each chunk against the tigertree, but it _should_.
3. Ultrapeer "crawling" via udp queries.
4. support for gnutella: , ed2k: , and magnet: urls, all of which are also integrated into the shell.
The moral:
**As long as you don't break the existing stuff,**
If standards groups can't decide on standards, go ahead and add your own improvements. Let the improvements be accepted or rejected by the natural meritocratic movements of the open-source/open-standards worlds.
Lots of neat-o technology has been wasted effort because standards groups couldn't agree on the standard before the technology was outdated. (e.g. ip/lan.e over atm).
The makers of those other two *crippled*,*crapwar-burdened* semi-commercial clients are probably upset because their client doesn't have these nifty new features. And the best part: Shareaza hasn't (yet) broken the existing gnetwork.
(I have no problem with commercial products. they're great. support is great. my problem is with "free"ware that bundles crap-ware for the uneducated masses.).
Gnucleus and Shareaza have been the best gnutella peer apps on the windows side because they
1) implement new features and new standards promptly,
2) don't abuse the gnet, and
3) don't carry any excess baggage.
and for the moment, this long-time-gnucleus-faithful-user has gone shareaza untill gnucleus implements these new features. and shareaza is ooohhh-soo-stable.
Again, the point:
**As long as you don't break the existing stuff,**
implement your own improvements to the specs. Let the improvements be accepted or rejected by the natural meritocratic movements of the open-source and open-standards worlds.
Committees are good when they are productive. In this case, the gnutella standards have been outgrown in some respects by a relative new-comer with great ideas, fast fingers, and healthy respect for existing standards and infrastructure.
Re:This is a huge beat-up (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, it is funny to hear people whining about co-opting the name, when the name itself is a pun on GNU and a yummy chocolate spread. If they're going to use a silent G in their name, they ought to honor that convention and conduct development of the protocol in an open manner, and GPL their reference implementation. It wouldn't stop the bickering, but it would give a clear moral high ground to those who release actual code.
Why don't they nickname this new protocol "mutella". It's catchy, likely to carry greater mindshare than "gnutella2", and incorporates Mike's name while offering him a suggestion.
I don't ever use gnutella, I use giFT (Score:4, Interesting)
http://gift.sourceforge.net/
" What is giFT, you ask? giFT is a modular daemon capable of abstracting the communication between the end user and specific filesharing protocols (peer-to-peer or otherwise). The giFT project differs from many other similar projects in that it is a distribution of a standalone (platform-independent) daemon, a library for client/frontend development, and our own homegrown network OpenFT. "
This is a great network, where you find many oggs, downloads actually work (up to 600kb/s!!) and finding files is really fast. Lots of altruists are using it. Plus: You have to compile it from CVS, which prevents idiots from using the network. On the average each user shares 8 GB!
G2: Starring Spite and Envy (Score:4, Interesting)
"...as long as gnutella2.com exists in its current form, you are all fifty cent whores that got pimped by Slimy Mike."
Childish and spiteful. This is not the attitude with which to reach compromise and solve problems. Name calling? Are we freakin' twelve?
In the end, the G2 opponents are being obstinately selfish, and the heated, illogical emotion they're injecting into this discussion is hurting far more than helping the community by delaying the widespread implementation and deployment of a superior protocol that has already been tested and used effectively in public hands.
I don't care what anyone personally thinks of Mike, his opinions, or how he's handled the unleashing of Shareaza on the world. The only working reason in this argument is the Gnutella2 mark, and the G2 opponents seem to be desperately clinging to it, as if this is the only way they can oppose G2 without showing their true feelings, which I suspect have to do either with personal conflicts such as Shareaza stepping on the feet of other Gnutella players. Surely its a sign that the Loud Voices complain that G2 will only cause a schism, but then turn around and talk about Gnutella3 as a way of battling G2. Would I be wrong to construe this as an indicator of where certain peoples' intentions really lie?
The G2 opponents are so busy thinking of creative ways to sanction Shareaza and Mike Stokes that they've not given a single thought to what course of action would most benefit the community of users in this situation. As a Gnutella user and developer, I say this spurious, wasteful behaviour must stop now before it gets any worse. I suggest they regain their emotional composure and grow the hell up.
For me, this is an awkward situation. I'm a proponent of all things open and Free, and I should support the GDF in this conflict else violate my principles. But my principles also encompass the proper behavior of a rationally thinking human being who wants to successfully communicate with others of his kind. In this regard, I find the behaviour of some GDF key players to be so repulsive that I like myself less when I support a protocol backed by propaganda-spewing, egotistical drama queens than when I support a protocol that's only quasi-open, or less, as is currently the case. (I _really_ hope Mike opens up G2. It would be such a graceful way of pulling the rug out from under these fools, and beyond that I don't know how long I can endure taking sides here without having an ethical melt-down.)
Niko
PS
Replace the phrase 'G2 opponents' with the name 'Vinnie', who seems to think calling people 'slimey' and 'imbicile' demonstrate one's argumentative superiority. His contradictions of logic, hypocrisy, personal attacks on the character of those making neutral observations or expressing neutral opinions, all serve as wonderful examples of how not to effectively influence people or raise support for a cause. He's like a politician who's election campaign consists of insulting the mothers of his constituents.
> All of this is a moot point. Mike wont change the name, no one here
> can make him. Get over it. This is so rediculously unimportant in
> the scheme of things I hate to see so much list traffic dedicated to
> it.
Amen.
Re:G2: Starring Spite and Envy (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
You're missing the point... (Score:3, Interesting)