For those of you who do not know, the above post was submitted by Vincent Falco, the developer of the popular Gnutella client, Bearshare. He is a frequent collaborator with the LimeWire team and valued colleague.

This thread gets into some quite technical details of the Gnutella protocol, so I will explain a bit.

When a Gnutella client returns a search result to another Gnutella client, it has the option to include metadata (data about data) in that search to supply more information.

Overall, there are four major fields supplied in the metadata that supply more information about the client returning the search result.


1) whether or not that client has upload slots available.

2) whether or not that client is firewalled.

3) whether or not that client has ever completed an upload to another client.

4) whether the connection speed supplied in the search result has been measured by the client or whether it was supplied by the user.


Vinnie began this practice of including metadata some number of months ago, and LimeWire chose not to include any of this extra information until LimeWire 1.4.

In LimeWire 1.4, we included the first two pieces of information because they are clearly beneficial. We did not include the other two because we did not see them as particularly useful. We responded with "maybe" in these fields as a result, which is distinguishable from "yes" and "no" and is defined in the protocol.

We did not do this out of any malicious intent in terms of giving LimeWire an advantage over Bearshare. Getting into this type of competition, we believe, is not in our interest or anyone else's. We do, however, regret not discussing this issue with the developers at Free Peers, as such a discussion would have cleared up any confusion and would have avoided any hard feelings.

We apologize for any confusion that this may have caused and hope that these issues can be worked out more fruitfully for all in the future.