Quote Originally Posted by O'nus View Post
What's Gnutella?

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-scratches head- I didn't know how to put it in my own words other than "It's effin awesome!" so I found this for you.

The Gnutella network is a fully distributed alternative to such semi-centralized systems as FastTrack (KaZaA) and such centralized systems as 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 closed-source clients) allowed somewhat of 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 became 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 open source Gnutella client Gnucleus.