We have learned what greed does for gnutella and now it's time for the greed to leave.
It would be easier for limewire and bearshare to leave, they already have their own little network.

BEARSHARE CONNECT/0.6
LIMEWIRE CONNECT/0.6

This would be easy. But they use the efforts of others as a back up plan to keep their market happy and so no way they are leaving.
See what morpheus did when they had a problem? Jump on the first thing they could grab to keep their $$$ market.
Think of what would happen if the "BearShare network" was just bear only and vinnie put out a new version that screwed up downloads. People would jump the boat in a minute. Can't have $$$ that!

Greed sucks and doesn't belong on gnutella. So either the $$$ clients leave, or the "outsiders" have to go.

With the connect string specifically stating OPENSOURCE it's hard for some closed source greedy people to come there, and with the rule/law of no $$ profit applied by the clients blocking them, then there will be no war for market share and no clustering, domination and so on.
Those who share files know that their files are going to other people without some third party making a buck off their efforts.
I don't see anything wrong with several of the clients with most of the base code being the same. Some may have features that others don't, and that is ok too.
Someone is always going to try to make a buck off of this, so clients have to block it as much as is possible or greed will slip in again.

Now, on to the other problem with greed.

Let's say, and just for fun, a court orders bearshare to send out a spy packet that shuts off all bearshare clients, and you know the RIAA would love to do this right now. We don't know if the spy packets can do that, but I bet it's in there because vinnie loves to control everything and hates it when you run old copies of his software.
Or worse, vinnie is offered a new $500,000 corporate housing unit on the beach if he spies on every user and reports that to the RIAA or is paid to screw things up or just leave.
If it was open source, he couldn't have spy packets or spy on people because everyone would see it in his code. The way it is now we have busted him on several things he has done, who knows what else is in there.
If it was open source someone could offer the author $$$ but for what? He can't do anything and if he did someone else would post a patch in 10 minutes to take it out.

The RIAA/MPAA greedmongers have no control over open source not for profit clients!

If they shut one site down that has the code, another will pop up in the next minute. Plus the code can be shared over the network. Let them try to stop that.
Limewire is a little different, and they aren't clustering as bad as vinnie is, and they can't because people would see it in the code and laugh them out of existence. They have to make a buck and so they come up with full blown XML because they have 5 developers working on it and know that small developers can't compete. It backfired!
The problem is even vinnie with all his $$ can't code the XML easy so no one else is using it, thus limewire only works with limewire and it's all a bunch of marketing/investor hype anyway.
Plus it's a waste of time for everyone to develop their own code when you could have one set of code as a base and have people put features on top of that. Then it doesn't take a whole corporation with CFO's and paper pushers all over the place to make a few new features.
Everyone will be welcome to download a free client and get on the OpenSource P2P Net. We hope they will also contribute some ideas, code or even "skins" to improve the client(s).
BearShare hasn't promoted Gnutella, it has promoted "The Bear$hare Network". It's not a community, it's a BearShare community. About the same with Limewire but not as bad.
Commercial clients will be blocked. Greed doesn't work in this situation. The RIAA works on greed and legally can't do anything if a buck isn't made. They can pull dirty tricks like DOS attacks, but then we have them by the balls.

P2P is about sharing, let's share the code, share some ideas and keep it free!

Besides all the politics, this network is moving forward. It's not a sporting event, it's not that this will be the #1 "winning" network. It's not that it will have the most files available or even the most users. It's not a race.
It's that this network will be the only "open and free" P2P network left after everyone gets sued or forced out of existence. Then all the MP3 sharing people will jump on the bandwagon, when it's the last resort, just like they always do.

So Morgwen, Moak and other people with a vision of the future, are your nodes ready yet?

Even a modem user could post his IP every day if it changes to help kick this off. Most cable modems keep the same IP for more than 30 days. Very small amount of bandwidth at first anyway so you can run this along with the other programs you like to run.
Nice thing about this board, you can post your IP without signing in if you like your privacy.