Sorry if I sounded harsh, but I've seen other authors try and "take over" the gnutella network. The excuse was always that the "other" peers were buggy and flawed and everyone should just be happy to accept whatever proprietary twist they decide to add.

There may very well be money to be made with P2P, but I don't think anyone should expect to make a fortune from gnutella. It's a grungy, imperfect, mutt of a protocol that has survived were other, sometimes better, protocols have failed largely because *anyone* can write a peer.

If it's to have a future there needs to be some agreed upon standards developed. This has been true for every other Internet protocol, so why should P2P be any different? What's needed is something like a P2P RFC.


I didn't mean you literally - more as a general warning to those that would try, but you were the one who seemed to be saying we should defer the development of gnutella to the beneficence of some company for it to be profitable.

What you seem to miss is no one besides those companies needs Gnutella to be profitable. Corporate sponsorship would hardly have the interests of its current users at heart. The truth is they don't care if you or any company never make one cent off of Gnutella. Actually why should they? It's only bad for them.

For what it is, Gnutella's better off being a garage protocol slapped together by CS students on a weekend lark. It will grow, sometimes painfully, in fits and starts, but in ways the users want - because some of those users *are* the developers, and someone will always be willing to make a peer that's better than the rest just because they want one. The same is true of Linux. It was a cool toy long before it became a "Corporate IT solution", and to be honest that's all it really needed to be. The companies embracing it are only benefiting from the open free-for-all ethic that created it. Thankfully a few even seem willing to give back for now.

Is your co-operation helpful? It depends what you want to do, what you plan to give back, and what you might take away. Too many developers look at Gnutella's popularity and dollar signs flash in their eyes. They don't care about making it better for its users - only finding a way to make it better serve them.

Honestly, your questions seem a bit, well, anachronistic. Surely you must know gnutella has *never* only shared music - it's has always been about as generic a file sharing protocol as it gets. I actually filter MP3's out of my results because I'm looking for other stuff. Also, spam turned out to be kind of a non-issue. It hasn't been much of a problem for a over a year. Currently there's much more pressing things facing the network.

For example, it's getting very hard to find files that aren't very popular and well distributed. This is a protocol flaw, and other P2P protocols have already overcome it. It's just a matter of getting all the current developers to agree on the same implementation.

Maybe you should lurk around these boards for awhile, or read up on Gnutella's current development. Things have changed drastically since a year ago, and some of your questions seem points long moot.



That's nice, but it already is and does.

Actually I may have completely missed what you were after. So I'll ask, what is it you'd like to accomplish with Gnutella? What do you expect it to do for you that some other P2P protocol wouldn't do better?

There's already been a good deal of development in alternate P2P uses with far more commercial potential (swarming comes to mind), so why Gnutella? It's not an attack, it's a valid question - what use does any company have for this mutt? It may even be the *worst* of all the P2P protocols, but people use it because it half-way works for what they want.

I'd expect a company to choose something better, and it always makes me suspicious when anyone talks of its commercial potential. Either they don't know what been going on in P2P, or they've really set their sights on milking its userbase (which is gnutella's only real asset).