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I asked about if bearshare was close source. It seems its true. So, I wish to know what the gnutella comunity think about the use of the protocol and the network by these close source programs and strong comercial programs (this is a diferrent case, like Morpheus, that is open source but really comercial).
I am thinking about make a client (i said this yet) and about if i wish to make it close or open source.
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Mine will be closed source too when released. It's the Gnutella protocol itself that needs to remain uncommercialized and public domain. Just like, say, the HTTP protocol. But it should be fine to have commercial or closed source applications built based on the open protocol (think Netscape, Opera, MSIE, IIS, Apache, etc for HTTP).
The best part of that is that it will allow healthy competition. End users will have a wider choice of Gnutella clients, each for everyone's taste. And if such client isn't out there, people are free to use the Gnutella protocol to make one that does meet their ideas/demands and optionally release it.