Yep Morgwen! You have to like the programming language, the idea behind, the team and they have to like you.

I did want to help in a promising Gnutella project some months before. So I wrote to some client programers to ask some simple questions, but they even didn't answer or their project was allready dead. I didn't want to work on a project that is not supported anymore. Then I personnal don't want to code Java (Limewire or Phex, even both are cool clients) or Pascal (Xolox is Delphi and the code is not available after discontinue of Xolox, said Pasman). Finally I decided not to program another servant alone and just help some users and developers. After Xolox is dead I pesonally see no place where I can help.... now I try to support this 42er forum a little bit.

While Gnutella development was very slow in the last months, I appreciate any new programmer that starts a new client and comes with new technologies!!! Oh and it was told that the variety of clients does protect Gnutella against lawsuits and increases competition. Gnutella needs some pushs forward, yeah man!

Currently active clients in development seems to be only 4, in alphanumerical order: Bearshare, Gnotella (active?), Limewire (research!), Phex. I'm not sure about Gnucleus and Mutella, it seems they patch bugs and sleep? The future of famous Xolox is unknown or RIP. A promising newbie might be PEERanha. In contrast to Gnutella there are other (proprieatary) P2P system you might want to look at, they provide valueable ideas (!) and modern technologies to learn from: FastTrack (aka Morpheus/Kazaa/Grokster), eDonkey, Freenet, Guerillia and uServ.