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Gnutella
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GNUTELLA: Gnutella is a system in which individuals can exchange files over the Internet directly without going through a Web site in an arrangement sometimes described as peer-to-peer (here meaning "person-to-person"). Like Napster and similar Web sites, Gnutella is often used as a way to download music files from or share them with other Internet users and has been an object of great concern for the music publishing industry. Unlike Napster, Gnutella is not a Web site, but an arrangement in which you can see the files of a small number of other Gnutella users at a time, and they in turn can see the files of others, in a kind of daisy-chain effect. Gnutella ... allows you to download any file type, whereas Napster is limited to MP3 music files.
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Gnutella is an important new tool on the Internet. It allows people to share the files they have on their systems (selectively, of course). Better yet, it allows everyone who shares a file to contribute to others who are downloading it, so downloads are lightning fast without having to burden any one server.
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Gnutella was born sometime in early March 2000. Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper, working under the dot-com pen name of Gnullsoft, are Gnutella's inventors. Their last life-changing product, Winamp, was the beginning of a company called Nullsoft, which was purchased by American Online (AOL) in 1999. Winamp was developed primarily to play digital music files. According to Tom Pepper, Gnutella was developed primarily to share recipes.
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Where did Gnutella come from? The evil-geniuses at Nullsoft (creators of Winamp) first developed the protocol in late 1999. Since Nullsoft had recently been acquired by AOL (soon to be AOL-Time Warner), the problems that would arise remain obvious. Nullsoft basically had to cease using the company’s resources to develop this technology because the record labels saw (and still see) it as a threat to their industry.
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Gnutella was developed in just fourteen days by two guys without college degrees. It was released as an experiment. Unfortunately, executives at AOL were not amenable to improving the state of recipe sharing and squashed the nascent Gnutella just hours after its birth. What was supposed to be a GNU General Public License product when it matured to Version 1.0 was never allowed to grow beyond Version 0.56. Certainly if Gnutella were allowed to develop further under the hands of Frankel and Pepper, this chapter would look a lot different.
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AOL had forced Nullsoft to stop all development on Gnutella but a few updates were leaked out to secure the continued spread and vialbity of Gnutella on the Internet. The last version written by Justin Frankel was 0.56. The source code was intended to be released to the public once it reached version 1.00 but never did. These first updates were released on the nerdherd website and distributed to the public.
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