The GDF went mostly silent after LW lost in court. gtk-gnutella kept moving forward, because the developer did not care about the legalities. Phex development (where I was involved) mostly stopped, since the legal risk was too great. LimeWire did everything right and still lost in court, so it was clear that the legal system is too corrupted to risk working on systems which aren’t firmly focussed on protecting constitutional rights (I moved to contributing to Freenet).
I’m still a moderator in the GDF, though, and I would love to see Gnutella flourish again. Though we never managed to stop commercial disruption completely (spammers throwing fake files in the network), I still see it as the best technical solution for distributed searching, and the download mesh provides the features of torrents without requiring single points of failure (torrent sites) or a global DHT.
Also current WebRTC technologies should even enable implementing Gnutella directly in the browser — with the connection times on the order of seconds, this would provide instant distributed search. |