<a href="http://www.gnutellanews.com/article.html?id=5747">http://www.gnutellanews.com/article.html?id=5747</a><br><br><br>From the <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/the_gdf/message/">Gnutella Developer Forum</a>:<p><blockquote>GDF,<p>I'm proud to announce that LimeWire has gone open source under the GPL license and <a href="http://www.limewire.org">http://www.limewire.org</a> is open. We may not have worked out all of the kinks in the site but what the heck. There is only one way to find out.<p>As you all know, LimeWire has wanted to provide a quality reference implementation for the proposals that we have been suggesting and implementing. We have also felt that there must be an open implementation underlying the Gnutella protocol for Gnutella to become a fundamental technology of the internet. Academics and all developers should have a baseline core engine and client that they can experiment with and base their work on. What attracted us to Gnutella is that it was an open protocol and free for all to use. We reject closed protocols such as FastTrack/Kazaa/Morpheus.<p>At the same time, we have seen the vitality in the Gnutella community. From developers to users and supporters in general, there is a great deal of interest and energy. However, in the developer community there has not been a great deal of code sharing. There are many of us building duplicate functionality in both open and closed source clients. We hope to bring like-minded developers together at LimeWire.org for the benefit of the whole Gnutella community. It is our intention to move forward at a much faster speed to fulfill Gnutella's potential. We welcome all who wish to help build Gnutella's future. LimeWire looks forward to exploring many potential uses and improvements to a Gnutella based P2P system. We can discuss further specifics on our LimeWire.org mailing lists.<p>I look forward to hearing your feedback.<p>Thanks<br>-greg</blockquote>

Wow - Great move! That's fantastic news - especially considering LimeWire is perhaps *the* leading G-Net peer. I think opening the code of such a good example will really help other peers' protocol implementation.

P.S. What's the deal with SwapNut - it appears to be using code very similar to LimeWire, but they're doing some things that make me a bit nervous.

SwapNut licensed the code from LimeWire. What are they doing that's making you nervous?

This is a terrific move by limewire, one that will bring the gnutella community closer together; and a move that hopefully other developers will follow in the near future.

This is truly a smart move by LimeWire LLC. The power of cross platform compatability combined with the open-source community; This is gonna go somewhere..........

Well, this thread for one...

http://www.gnutellaforums.com/showth...?threadid=3860

Even if it's not true spamming (since the user is asked) - the program is target towards newbies, and many may not understand that "inform your friends" really means "Spam everyone in your address book". This kind of marketing is likely to cause UCE complaint to ISPs and result in people's accounts being pulled.

Plus just the general way their home page never mentions Gnutella by name (as if they want to hide that from their users). They just say they use a "major" file sharing network. I hope this isn't another attempt by a company to co-opt the g-net at the expense of the other peers. At least by using LW's code it has a good, reliable base to build from.

Limewire goes open source, that is amazing news! wow. great move, really. but when i tried to actually download the lime code it seemed to me that there were no source code archives available, one is to use either cvs or to download every single file (really annoying)... are you going to submit archives containing the gui and core source code of the latest version, 1.7 ? I've always been a java enthusiast and have never seen a java program as advanced as Limewire, i would love to see the source code.

this rules, now if someone can just add functionality to search other peoples hard drives to find people with similar tastes and then automatically download files from thoes computers when your not actively at your computer i think this could revolutionize the exchange of information , and have as important an impact on humanity as the invention of writing.