Hi,

New here but been using Limewire for 2 years. I personally believe that it is of bennefit to discourage free riding. I will support this thesis by my own personal case hstory exrience.

When I first started using Limewire, I had only abour 200 tracks in my shared folder. Most of these were obtained using Napster before it went dead. I was not adding any content to the Gnutella network because all of my content was obtained outside my own personal environment. It was already available on someone elses computer. My computer was just a mirror of what you could get from someone else. IE: nothing original was contrbuted. It wasn't that I didn't have any music of my own to share, It was more of a "maybe some day I will get around to ripping my own library into mp3's and then sharing them"

Finally one day I decided to stop being a freeloader.
Two major things happened to allow this.

First a long and exhaustive search led me to what IMHO is the best peice of software for Ripping/organizing/burning a music library. It is called Media Jukebox. (disclaimer: I am not in anyway associated with the company that publishes this Media Jukebox, just a satisfied user) This program allowed me to rip all of my own CD's and organize them into a well organized MP3 jukebox (now over 2700 tracks worth and I still havent added over 20 years of vinyl yet, but is soon to come)

Second, I needed to upgrade hardware to do this project. I added 2, 30GB hard drives dedicated to just MP3, one drive is the shared drive and the other is a mirror for backup purposes.

I now share over 2700 tracks, and have added much new content from my personal library, including a fair amount of out of print, no longer obtainable content.

OK: now back to why I did this. I did not want to feel that I was one of the Freeloaders. I wanted to do my share, to promote Gnutella. And I had no idea if I was being denyed the sharing of other users because my shared library was too small. Perhaps if everyone was forcet to come onto Gnutella with a minimum of 500 to 1000 files of their own, we could force the addition of much new and original content not heretofore available. Lets face it, myself included, human nature is to be lazy. People usually don't do anything that takes an effort unless someone forces them to. And yes, it was an effort to rip more than 200 CD's into my computer, but now I am no longer a Freeloader, and I feel that if I had been forced to do this from the start, I would have done it sooner.

I think our efforts here should be partially devoted to geting newbies started on the right track, and force them to do so if necessary.

Hope I haven't ruffled any feathers, but that's just my opinion.