I don't know where you download your torrents. I never used any pay-per-suck trackers or any 1337 non-public torrent site. I'm not dense enough to leave my email address in such places, not even a hotmail alias. Anyway, I've download well over 1000 torrents in a few years and never had trouble with ratios. BitTorrent really isn't fair in the literal sense or as some interpret it. Most people on this planet use miserable ADSL or even worse. I for one can download 8-10 times as fast as I can upload. Do you really expect me to seed a file for almost two weeks when it took me day to download it? Maybe you do but I can guarantee you few people will. Just accept that there are people with little and others with more bandwidth. The onces with less often even pay more - in relation anyway - for their bandwidth so it's not like these people are horribly selfish. Sometimes I upload files 10x as often as I download them but most of the time I get at best a 1:1 ratio. Sometimes there just is *nobody* to upload to. That's often when you download at full-speed from a single seed. The larger the file, the less likely that I'll upload it just once because it will get in the way of more important stuff. That's what I also prefer on Gnutella. You can download file by file. If you don't care about the whole set, there's no point in downloading everything and you also have to wait only a few minutes to hours before you have something you can use. When you download with BitTorrent you can hardly preview files nor can you watch them on the fly. Also with Gnutella, all my shared files are *always* availble. Sure my bandwidth will have to be shared among all popular files but Gnutella is full of redundancy. It's better to get a file at a moderate speed than not all, right?

Technically, BitTorrent has little what Gnutella doesn't have and nowadays Gnutella is often just as fast as BitTorrent. Of course not with every file, you'll need a couple of source or at least one fast but that's not different with BitTorrent. Sometimes people even think BitTorrent invented swarming. Nonsense, "download accelerators" swarmed downloads from FTP and HTTP servers long before Napster existed. Gnutella introduced (proper checksummed) swarming in 2002 or even 2001. So it's about as BitTorrent, just that the latter wasn't really well-known or popular before 2004 when a sun exploded. The success of BitTorrent is not the protocol. It's the torrent listing web sites. These prevent spam effectively and increase the quality of content as well as its quantity. Gnutella really offers to combine both. A distributed search engine which is subject to some amount of spamming but link listing sites work just as well with Gnutella. Magnet links are heavily under-utilized, mainly because all Gnutella developers were in a long hibernation and never got around to implement a Distributed Hashtable (DHT) which is required for efficient searches by SHA-1. The latter isn't strictly necessary for Gnutella though as it's very flexible. A tracker-like server with source caching would work just as well. Now if people download high quality content, they will high quality content et voila you'll find more high quality content when you search for it. BitTorrent definitely had a positive effect on Gnutella as well. Many files are originally distributed over BitTorrent and then re-shared in Gnutella.

Therefore, I think the developers of LimeWire are on the wrong track. They may be successful nonetheless but I'd prefer if they improved Gnutella instead. For example, they should have finished their DHT before adding BitTorrent. In the long run, having a DHT for Gnutella *and* BitTorrent will be rather redundant. I believe, BitTorrent support was mainly introduced due to the BitTorrent hype and because they were scared of losing further users (marketshare) to it. I would say this fear is unnecessary. There will always be lemmings running after the next hype but after all Gnutella and BitTorrent have been complimentary so far. Whereas BitTorrent offers you something, Gnutella is the huge store that let's you decide yourself what you're going to look for and each work well in their own areas. I've used BitTorrent extensively but I've never stopped using Gnutella and actually I have more upload bandwidth available due to BitTorrent because the files I get from there, I get really fast. Getting *those* at least at the same time from Gnutella would have taken much more time and resources. As said both have different publishing schemes. A couple of days or weeks later, you'll get the same stuff just as fast from Gnutella. Personally, I really don't give a flying **** whether anyone downloading from me is a freeloader or not. There's someone who likes the same stuff as me. That's cool and that's all I care about. It's a good backup method anyway. Maybe some day, I'll lose some of those files and then I can just get them back again from Gnutella. You shouldn't try decided whether someone is a freeloader or not by looking at a snapshot of its upload history. Maybe someone is a freeloader for a year and then becomes a gracious uploader. This freeloader issue is mainly caused by ADSL anyway. If everybody had a symmetric internet connection nobody would give a **** upload throttling the upload rate or even preventing uploads completely. ADSL was only introduced to sell commercial pay-per-view service later. For these you only need much bandwidth in one direction. These plans have mostly failed so far because people found a better way to use their bandwidth and commercial services are simply too greedy or just as uncomfortable and unreliable as the worst free P2P network.