![]() Gnutella is not associated with the GNU project. Supposedly, Frankel and Pepper ate a lot of nutella working on the original project, and they were going to use the GNU GPL license on the finished program. The name is a word play on GNU and Nutella. Since new clients are under development all over, and since a new protocol is apparently on the way too, it is hard to say what the word 'Gnutella' will mostly stand for in the future. Sometimes the word 'Gnutella' refers not to a particular project or particular piece of software, but to the open protocol used by various clients. Morpheus a commercial file sharing group, on 28th Feb 2002 abandoned their FastTrack based peer-to-peer software and released a new client based on the open source Gnutella client Gnucleus. ![]() In late 2001, the Gnutella client LimeWire, which had driven much of the protocol's development, was released as open source. This allowed the network to grow in popularity. 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. In early 2001, variations of the protocol (implemented first in closed source clients) allowed scalabilty to improve somewhat. This growing surge in popularity revealed the limits of the initial protocol's scalabilty. Initial popularity of the network was spurred on by Napster's threatened legal demise in early 2001. The Gnutella network would be a fully distributed alternative to semi-centralized systems like Napster. This parallel development of different clients by different groups remains the modus operandi of Gnutella development today. This did not stop Gnutella after a few days the protocol had been reverse engineered and compatible open source clones started showing up. ![]() The next day, AOL stopped the availability of the program over legal concerns and restrained the Nullsoft division from doing any further work on the project. The event was prematurely announced on Slashdot, and thousands downloaded the program that day. The source code was to be relased later, supposedly under the GNU General Public License (GPL). On March 14, the program was made available for download on Nullsoft's servers. The first client was developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft, a division of AOL, in early 2000. ![]()
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