Yo dude, Sephiroth, completly ignoring reality now?
The best Gnutella clients are _not_ commercial, even I wonder which programs you're talking about
: Most famous are Xolox, Phex, Limewire, Gnotella yet. For example Bearshare and Swapnut (the only proprietary clients) play a minor role (and with a lack of a serious business models they are financed by spyware plus some adds to pay the website AFAIK). No unknown commercial programs did push forward or develop Gnutella. To tell you the truth: the origin of Gnutella is uncommercial (Justin@Nullsoft) and all later developers did envolve the idea of Gnutella together.
Gnutelliums names 15 different clients, you'll find more on
sourceforge.
Actually the most energy came from a free developers community: for example Ex-Clip2 with their documentation or their Reflector (the first supernode), Limewire (OpenSource) does a huge amount of research, Phex has implemented some new features (OpenSource too), the_GDF together did envolve many ideas (slow but they do constantly) and especially the individuals of Xolox which did adapted some of FastTrack/eDonkey ideas (Xolox is no commercial product too).
It seems you completly deny the role of open source for Gnutella or IT development in general, what about Linux, GNU, BSD, apache, squid, samba, Gnome, KDE, etc? Some meaningless side effects that were build on commmercial products? Denying reality? You brought up the idea of open source for the survive of Gnutella, now you don't like it? I also wonder how should a commercial gnutella developer survive... currently there isn't one company with a working Gnutella business model! Isn't a Gnutella company an imagination, just a dream? It's ridiculous saying a company is responsible for Gnutellas development, commercial proprietary programs are a minor part of Gnutella development since the beginning.
Without a free developer community Gnutella would be _far_ behind! Actually Gnutella is far behind other P2P technologies like FastTrack and eDonkey... the most important thing is a strong and cooperative developer community now (no more propaganda, no more aggresive marketing).
Reducing this post to one sentence:
Let's have some fun and push gnutella forward