the developers of any 0.4 clients have 3-4 months to add the code. Simple enough. If they dont they will be blocked from connecting to bearshare. Other clients may still connect with them and therefor they would still be connected to bs clients. Dont forget, Vinnie is also blocking his own old clients in order to force people to upgrade.

Gnutella is growing and changing. HUGE is being implemented, meta data, ect. These old clients dont have this and if they cant even update the handshake they certainly arent going to update these important features.

Xolox will be a thing of the past in a month anyway so quite bringing it up. It had some great features and gave the other developers a much needed kick in the *** but the client is dead. The meta data being sent now corrupts it and other clients will be properly implementing swarmed downloads with file hashes and meshes.

The only thing that bearshare and limewire need to do is find a gnet friendly way to requery the network. I know they are working on it but what they have in mind right now I dont know.