as someone who is for the first time selecting a gnutella client, and reviewing these boards before making a choice, eg: hey developers, I'm probably your market base, I WILL NOT put bearshare on my machine.

why? because Vinnie clearly considers his user base a form of leverage against other clients to maximize his market control. it's waaaay to early for these games in the evolution of gnutella, and will do nothing but harm the necessary creativity, and the necessary WIDE USE of gnutella protocols to make it an ubiquitous web tool.

less important to me is the fiction of my freedom in the internet: the spyware/snooping crap we get way too much of anyway, and i boycott
where I can...

on the flip side: how great it is that one can actually peruse the different boards, which have very informed discussions, before selecting a product.

kudos to all, even Vinnie for his capitalist
unrepentant drive (but I do hope his company
fails!),

best,
Another Jackass Who Won't Touch Bearware.

It's time the other open source developers of Gnutella clients gets organized and make Vinnie stay in line before he ruins the net.

His attempts at making the gnutella net proprietary for Bearshare is dangerous. Is he paid by the RIAA to destroy the net or something? When enough users have started using Bearshare, power people in the music and movie industry will probably buy his company.

Vinnie,

This is a proprietary message that BearShare uses for determining the version number, newer versions, and measurement of the FreePeers horizon in the Statistics page...
The information contained in these messages is proprietary and
confidential.

You're contradicting yourself here. You say these messages are confidential, but you don't mind telling us what's in them? Why not open them so we can all see what's going on? Sounds to me like there's something you're not telling us. Why the big secret? You sending your sourcecode out with every message? Or the secret family recipe for baked beans?

There have been many reactons to this proprietary technique. One is that it "breaks" the Gnutella protocol, or is not compliant with the protocol. However, nothing in the protocol specifies that queries have to be for files, or that search results must contain files. The "protocol" only defines the format of the messages so that applications may be interperable. I designed the encoding scheme so that it is easy to identify and deal with.

So you wouldn't mind if I wrote a servent that used query messages for chatting? Or how about if I used them to send advertizing banners to all of my servents (by way of everyone else, of course).

C'mon, Vinnie. Maybe other servents could adopt your "version info" messages to improve the network for us all. I fear that a war between servents (eg. developers) could easily kill this wonderful little network of ours.

I salute your efforts to preserve the speed and strength of the network... I salute your efforts to show restraint...

...but I believe you need to be the bigger man here. Show the other guys how a real servent is done. Don't squash them for doing it wrong. If all you did was write an essay describing the pitfalls you've identified and suggesting solutions... newer servents (by less experienced developers) would be less likely to do dumb stuff that screw up the network for the rest of us. You may not be trying to control the network, but your market dominance in some sense obligates you to take a leadership role here. Don't let them turn you into a tyrant. We believe you're above that.

Kutulus and Vinnie should partner up. Grumpy old men style. They could create their own "perfect" software and even create their own "perfect" empire (Possibly named after their famous quote: "**** *** ****** *** ***** **** the world") that would rival microsoft. Note to you guys: A.) Get some person skills, they would be much more useful than the "Programmin Jamz Skillz" you have now and B.) In order to do this you guys may need to grow up. I am 17 years old in age, but light years older in maturity (by the looks of it) This is my idea of a slam, where the worst word in the whole post is "Skillz" and that's only because it is spelled wrong! You guys seem intelligent, how about you use that intelligence towards the people who will eventually help you someday! "Don't Burn Bridges." --Unknown

curious...are they "another jackass" because they questioned your actions/decisions/behaviour, or are all posters in forums lumped into the same catagory?

and the "another.. " part might be hinting at some anti-social tendancies. Maybe its not " them ", maybe its " you "?

Vinnie, why don't you just remove these queries? It would save a lot of arguing and would be best for gnutella. I think it's just a way to help maintain Bearshare's dominance over gnutella. The last thing we need is for the clients to start screwing eachother. Damn it, please give in and do whats best for gnutella!

You developers have the whole thing in your hands, don't act like kids.

There was a point in time where there were a large number of disruptive members on BearShare.Net.

These threads are the remnants of that disruption.

The problem has been resolved - these old threads are no longer relevant.

What is important for the final user?

It must be easy to connect.
It must give you good, relevant results.

That was the reason why Napster was so popular.

Bearshare now sucks. You can't connect anymore, you have to keep trying for hours only to get unstable connections. And results? Only a few results, no matter what you are looking for, be it Madonna or Stockhausen. 23 results for New Order? What is that?

DON'T USE IT! Try WinMX, iMesh or AudioGalaxy. Vinnie believes he is always right so there is no use talking to him. He is perfect, he is brilliant, he is a genius. He is so brilliant he managed to screw the whole Gnutella network with his piece of ****...

And that is the reason why bearshare is so popular...

Imesh is the biggest bull**** I have ever seen with his ****ing cydoors...

but you know what about you are talking you are a programmer...

but you are unable to configure a small easy sharing prog...



Morgwen