We have never like the idea of ads, but it is a necessary step to pay the bills. Our bandwidth costs alone are around $10,000 per month. And of course we have to pay our developers' salaries. All the revenue from the LimeWire client goes to developing open-source code. It is doubtful that advertising and bundled spyware will completely cover our expenses, but if it does, we hope to give some back to major open source contributors.

LimeWire 1.8 has some really exciting new features. The media player is the most obvious one, but the metadata support is probably the most important. This will help take Gnutella to unprecedented levels of functionality. We also have some great features coming down the pipe, like swarmed downloads and supernodes. This is not vaporware; both are completely implemented and in the process of being tested.

We hope that users are willing to put up with a few ads in order to bring you these new features. Thanks to those loyal users--like unregistered #2--who are already doing so!

-Christopher Rohrs