March 20th, 2007
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| A reader, not an expert | | Join Date: January 11th, 2003 Location: Canada
Posts: 4,613
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http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gnutella.html Quote:
"Gnutella" is, at present, the name for a protocol for distributed file sharing, mostly used for music files. The name also sometimes refers to the network itself, as well as the original Gnutella software. The situation is quite confusing. For more on Gnutella's origin and history, please refer to the Wikipedia article on the subject.
In any case, the name was originally a word play on "GNU" (the original developers planned to release their code under the GNU GPL, and may have had in mind contributing it to the GNU project) and "Nutella" (a candy bar that the original developers enjoyed).
| BTW--The original gnutella software was released on March 14 just over 7 years ago. Quote:
The first client was developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft in early 2000, soon after the company's acquisition by AOL. On March 14, the program was made available for download on Nullsoft's servers. The event was prematurely announced on Slashdot, and thousands downloaded the program that day. The source code was to be released later, supposedly under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
The next day, AOL stopped the availability of the program over legal concerns and restrained Nullsoft from doing any further work on the project. This did not stop Gnutella; after a few days, the protocol had been reverse engineered, and compatible open-source clones began to appear.
| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnutella  |