Gnutella - History

History

The first client was developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft in early 2000, soon after the company's acquisition by AOL. On March 14, the program was made available for download on Nullsoft's servers. The event was prematurely announced on Slashdot, and thousands downloaded the program that day. The source code was to be released later, under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The next day, AOL stopped the availability of the program over legal concerns and restrained Nullsoft from doing any further work on the project. This did not stop gnutella; after a few days, the protocol had been reverse engineered, and compatible free and open source clones began to appear. This parallel development of different clients by different groups remains the modus operandi of gnutella development today.

The gnutella network is a fully distributed alternative to such semi-centralized systems as FastTrack (KaZaA) and the original Napster. Initial popularity of the network was spurred on by Napster's threatened legal demise in early 2001. This growing surge in popularity revealed the limits of the initial protocol's scalability. In early 2001, variations on the protocol (first implemented in proprietary and closed source clients) allowed an improvement in scalability. Instead of treating every user as client and server, some users were now treated as ultrapeers, routing search requests and responses for users connected to them.

This allowed the network to grow in popularity. In late 2001, the gnutella client LimeWire Basic became free and open source. In February 2002, Morpheus, a commercial file sharing group, abandoned its FastTrack-based peer-to-peer software and released a new client based on the free and open source gnutella client Gnucleus.

The word gnutella today refers not to any one project or piece of software, but to the open protocol used by the various clients.

The name is a portmanteau of GNU and Nutella, the brand name of an Italian hazelnut flavored spread: supposedly, Frankel and Pepper ate a lot of Nutella working on the original project, and intended to license their finished program under the GNU General Public License. Gnutella is not associated with the GNU project or its own peer-to-peer network, GNUnet.

On October 26, 2010, popular free-software gnutella servent LimeWire was ordered shut down by Judge Kimba Wood of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York when she signed a Consent Injunction which LimeWire and recording industry plaintiffs had agreed upon. This event caused a notable drop in the size of the network because, while negotiating the injunction, LimeWire had staff add remote shutdown of gnutella access and file transfers as some users installed affected versions. When the injunction came into force versions later than 5.5.10 left the network or were disabled as users started them. The shut down did not affect FrostWire, a fork of LimeWire made in 2004 that excluded blocking code and adware. Since LimeWire is free software, nothing prevents people from making additional forks of LimeWire, unaffected by the shut down, if they wished, as long as it does not use LimeWire trademarks.

On November 9, 2010, LimeWire was resurrected by a secret team of developers and named LimeWire Pirate Edition. It was based on LimeWire 5.6 BETA. This version had its server dependencies removed and all the PRO features enabled for free.