Exit Gnutella?

Source: Wired News

The open-source heir apparent to Napster may not survive long enough to claim the crown.

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Conflict from within the open-source family of developers creating Gnutella, and not its current technical dificulties, could be the file-sharing network's downfall.

Bad code can be fixed," said Rob Johnson, an open-source programmer, "but conflicts and confusion among the coders themselves could stop the protocol that was supposed to be unstoppable."

Bill Schmidt, the developer of gnuCache, software for connecting to the Gnutella network, thinks that Gnutella in its current form is "useless," and that evangelists have pushed users to adopt the protocol before it is close to being ready.

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If you can find a file that you are looking for, you are very lucky. And there are hundreds of ways to spam or flood the network with little or no ability to stop the offenders," said Schmidt, who has documented his experiences.

Schmidt has stopped developing gnuCache because he believes that making Gnutella easier to use will soon render the system a complete failure.

Unlike Napster, which relies on centralized servers to distribute music files, Gnutella uses a peer-to-peer networking architecture that relies on users' PCs to track and forward files.

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Johnson thinks that Gnutella was an interesting experiment that essentially proved that peer-to-peer networks only work well when they are small.

"Imagine that I ask you a question, and you know that the answer is no. But instead of just telling me that, you proceed to ask everyone that you know what they think the answer is," Johnson said. "And they ask everyone they know ... and on and on."

Johnson said computers also have to wait for responses from computers on dialup connections, which further slows down the process.

"That's essentially the problem with a P2P network -'“ there is no central authority that you can directly connect with who can supply the 'answer' -- instead you keep pushing the query down the line," Johnson said. "So the more computers that are logged onto a P2P network, the slower it becomes."

What is wrong with all the Napster alternatives? Scour bankrupt, Gnutella code sucks... and napster still controls the world...

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