Gnutella

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Gnutella is a file sharing network used primarily to exchange music, films and software. It is a true peer-to-peer network; it operates without a central server. Files are exchanged directly between users.

Gnutella client programs connect to the network and share files. Search queries are passed from one node to another in round-robin fashion. Gnutella clients are available for a number of platforms.

According to the file sharing website Slyck, Gnutella is one of the popular file sharing networks on the Internet. While figures vary from hour to hour and day to day, Gnutella is thought to host on average approximately 1.8 million users, although around 400,000-500,000 at one time.

Spyware

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History

The first client was developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft, in early 2000, soon after the company's acquisition by AOL. On March 14, the program was made available for download on Nullsoft's servers. The event was prematurely announced on Slashdot, and thousands downloaded the program that day. The source code was to be released later, supposedly under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The next day, AOL stopped the availability of the program over legal concerns and restrained Nullsoft from doing any further work on the project. This did not stop Gnutella; after a few days, the protocol had been reverse engineered, and compatible open-source clones began to appear. This parallel development of different clients by different groups remains the modus operandi of Gnutella development today.

The Gnutella network is a fully distributed alternative to such semi-centralized systems as FastTrack / KaZaA (safe, supported, privacy protection) and such centralized systems as Napster. Initial popularity of the network was spurred on by Napster's threatened legal demise in early 2001. This growing surge in popularity revealed the limits of the initial protocol's scalability. In early 2001, variations on the protocol (first implemented in closed-source clients) allowed somewhat of an improvement in scalability. Instead of treating every user as client and server, some users were now treated as "ultrapeers", routing search requests and responses for users connected to them.

This allowed the network to grow in popularity. In late 2001, the Gnutella client LimeWire became open source. In February 2002, Morpheus, a commercial file-sharing group, abandoned its FastTrack-based peer-to-peer software and released a new client based on the open source Gnutella client Gnucleus.

The word "Gnutella" refers not to any one project or piece of software, but to the open protocol used by the various clients. Since various parties are developing new clients, and the protocol will likely continue to evolve, it is hard to say what the word 'Gnutella' will come to mean in the future.

The name is a portmanteau of GNU and Nutella: supposedly, Frankel and Pepper ate a lot of Nutella working on the original project, and intended to license their finished program under the GNU General Public License. Gnutella is not associated with the GNU project; see GNUnet for the GNU project's equivalent.

Some parts from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. These parts licensed under the GFDL.

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