They claim that because theres 'only five' of them, no one has time to read all this stuff we're generating for them for free!!

You'd think, being open source that they could maybe dedicate some time of one staff to harvesting the development resources available out here (ie us) to get this thing working better .. I've seen patches posted in these forums, for instance .. but I guess if they did that, we'd feel we were getting ripped off since those five people get paid and we don't .. it would seem unfair so in fact if we went for a totally free client we would get a better result.

Maybe someone can branch a free limewire? Would that be allowed?

Seems to me this ultrapeers idea has f***ed it up for any non-ultrapeer client (correct me if I'm wrong) so all the other clients need to implement limewire ideas anyway .. or is the reason other clients never connect (yes, I've tried a few over the last week and limewire gets the best results poor as they may be, of the clients I have tried) ... is the reason because limewire and bearshare both prefer there own company? This is a bug which should certainly be fixed before some real gnutclient wars start.

I think paying these guys is a BAD THING because they now have an incentive to make their client disregard other clients, to make it look like they limewire 'works better' .. this would be disgusting if true. Can anyone verify? I have a link, but it provides no actual evidence, just makes a claim to that effect.

Anyway, the thing is, with morpheus disintegrating recently, these guys have A LOT of money suddenly in their pockets - I bet they could easily afford to employ another 5 or 10 (at least!) full-time developers .. what with the $8 or whatever plus advertising fees they would have made a TON.

Look at this graph of gnutella client usage .. and bear (pun not intended) in mind that the vast majority of clients are limewire:

http://www.limewire.com/index.jsp/size

(historical note for when this page no longer shows the current period - the graph shows a jump first from ~20k hosts to ~50k around 14 Jan 2002 and a second bigger leap from ~90k to between 200k and 500k clients around 1 Mar)

I guess it's possible their graphing software just broke on these dates, but looking back through Google I find

<A HREF="http://groups.google.com/groups?q=gnutella+morpheus+limewire&start=10&hl=en &ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&scoring=d&as_drrb=b&as_mind=29&as_minm=2&as_miny =2002&as_maxd=2&as_maxm=3&as_maxy=2002&selm=a5m7h6 %24tos%241%40newsg2.svr.pol.co.uk&rnum=16">this kind of thing</A>

which implies to me, that even though morpheus did a commendable job at getting their own client switched over to gnutella, many users who wanted to fileshare sooner than that would have chosen limewire, widely espoused as the best gnutella client. And I have seen a number of postings which tell me these people are in many cases used to paying for software and quite happily signed up for the PRO version straight off (after all $8 is not much for some people).

But in spite of this sudden increase in demand, support and cash, have a look at their careers page:

http://www.limegroup.com/careers.html

They must think they're onto a dot-com!

Vive la revolution! Bring on the free ultrapeers!!!