The remote controls are why 5.2 and up are not recommended. There
was also that ridiculously boneheaded decision to replace the harmless and
removable WhenU adware with a locked-in implementation of Zango that
started calling home even before the install was complete. The fact that
Zango/180solutions fell into serious legal troubles at the time was no help.

Soon after they hastily abandoned Zango they were caught crippling download
capabilities to restrict BearShare to just music and short videos, (which was
how they killed iMesh) and when they realized they weren't getting away with
it tried to launch BearFlix, which was just BearShare horribly crippled to find
and download only pictures and video clips. Even now, users of 5.2 and
BearFlix will find they have problems connecting and downloading from
LimeWire. This appears to be a side effect of their attempts to alter
BearShare to their own purposes before they became fully familiar with it's
source code or with the gnutella protocol. Aside from that it looks like they
have stopped trying to kill or cripple it because not enough people are falling
for v6 yet.

Version 6 (which I am calling BearMesh ) appears to be simply a
Frankenstein monster assembled from scraps of BearShare and iMesh and
mostly devoted to renting music under one of the most draconian and hobbled
DRM schemes ever concocted. Their new EULA is a study in user hostility,
with weak attempts at humour failing to hide the fact that they demand you
keep up the monthly rent or the music will stop. Every week I am hearing
distress calls from people who enthusiastically gorged on the easy and fast
downloads of DRM-infected music while struggling to get any DRM-free MP3s
at all, only to find that all the gigabytes of "free" music they were enjoying
stopped working and their support requests went unanswered.


BearShare 5.1, on the other hand, is still the most powerful, stable and
trustworthy gnutella app available.

The beta testing features in 5.1.0b25 raise it's capabilities far above any
other servent that has ever existed and will probably remain at the top of the
heap until the gnutella protocol advances sufficiently to make all current
gnutella servents utterly useless. This will take at least a few years, even
with the incremental changes currently in the works, such as DHT.

All of the above are why b25 has been the one version strongly recommended
by those in the know since that bogus lawsuit. There are still plenty of smart
people who stuck with the ad-supported versions of 5.1 as well, even with the
constant nag to "upgrade" to 5.2. (The beta is also immune to that nag, by
the way )



As for the stats, BearShare has been collecting and displaying these
aggregate figures for years and they are still as harmless as ever. All they do
is give you a clear picture of overall BearShare performance and the size of
the network. These stats are how we detected the remote controlled
download throttle in the first place, and that's probably why the current
MAFIAA-collaborating owners of BearShare have removed the stats page from
their website.



That's pretty much the story since the summer of 2005. Nobody from the
MusicLab front has seen fit to dispute any of it and indeed they appear to
have been avoiding the public and even their own customers since they were
brought to the US by the RIAA to take over from Free Peers.

To sum up. BearShare is definitely not a sinking ship. The new owners have
just fallen off the wrong side of the pier and are still on shore trying to dry out
and figure out what went wrong while the rest of us are still at sea enjoying
the weather. If they start screwing around with BearShare 5.2 again, that's
probably when you'll start seeing mass migrations to LimeWire and the rest.
The Musiclab/iMesh folks have probably realized this (finally!) and will be reluctant
to make any more mistakes even when their MAFIAA masters apply more
pressure to instill their control freak mentality on the software again.