Just out of curiosity. Let's assume gnutella is free of legal hassles, and becomes truly functional. Even then how will it make developers any money?

Say it even becomes an established RFC'd protocol like FTP or HTTP. It's not exactly easy to make money with an FTP program or web browser now is it? The protocol itself, while necessary, hardly guarantees developers any of the profit.

It's already possible to make a reliable P2P protocol if you design it from scratch (ie FastTrack). From a financial standpoint, what is the benefit of retrofitting Gnutella? The established network of file swappers isn't of much use to corporate needs. If there's one thing even the thickest-headed VC guy must know by now, it's that's being wildly popular doesn't equal wildly profitable.

As I see it "gnutella" as a thing has almost no profit potential. Maybe years down the road some form of P2P will play a part in commercial applications, but not in any form the current gnutella developers will benefit from. If the commercial clients disappear (which unfortunately is beginning to sound likely), development will continue in the open source community, among universities CS students, etc.

Indeed, most of the Internet wasn't developed with profit in mind. It works largely because of that - corporations just won't play that nicely together.