Gnutella2 - History

History

In November 2002, Michael Stokes announced the Gnutella2 protocol to the Gnutella Developers Forum. While some thought the goals stated for Gnutella2, primarily to make a clean break with the gnutella 0.6 protocol and start over so that some of gnutella's less clean parts would be done more elegantly, to be impressive and desirable, other developers, primarily those of LimeWire and BearShare, thought it a "cheap publicity stunt" and discounted technical merits. Many still refuse to refer to the network as "Gnutella2" and instead refer to it as "Mike's Protocol" ("MP").

The Gnutella2 protocol still uses the old "GNUTELLA CONNECT/0.6" handshake string for its connections as defined in the gnutella 0.6 specifications, which was criticized by the GDF as an attempt to use the gnutella network for bootstrapping the new, unrelated network, while proponents of the network claimed that its intent was to remain backwards-compatible with gnutella to allow current gnutella clients to add Gnutella2 at their leisure.

With the developers entrenched in their positions, a flame war soon erupted, further cementing both sides' resolve.

The draft specifications were released on March 26, 2003, and more detailed specifications soon followed. G2 is not supported by many of the "old" gnutella network clients, however many Gnutella2 clients still also connect to gnutella. Many Gnutella2 proponents claim that this is because of political reasons, while gnutella supporters claim that the drastic changes don't have enough merit to outweigh the cost of deep rewrites.