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Gnutella (pronounced with a silent "g") is a distributed software project to create a true peer-to-peer file sharing network, without a central server.1 History
The first client was developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft, a division of AOL, in early 2000. 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, supposedly 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 open source clones started showing up. This parallel development of different clients by different groups remains the modus operandi of Gnutella development today.
The Gnutella network would be a fully distributed alternative to semi-centralized systems like FastTrack ( KaZaA) or centralized systems like 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 scalabilty. In early 2001, variations of the protocol (implemented first in closed source clients) allowed scalabilty to improve somewhat. 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, which had driven much of the protocol's development, was released as open source. In February, 2002, MorpheusFor other meanings of the name Morpheus, see Morpheus. Morpheus is the name of a file sharing client for Microsoft Windows, operated by the company StreamCast (formerly called MusicCity), that originally used the OpenNAP peer-to-peer (P2P) platform. Locat, 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 GnucleusIn computing, Gnucleus is a popular Gnutella client for the Microsoft Windows platform, released under the GPL license. The primary goals of the project are security and stability. The client is designed to be easy to use without reducing the number of op.
Sometimes the word "Gnutella" refers not to a particular project or particular piece of software, but to the open protocol used by various clients. Since new clients are under development in various locations, 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.
The name is a word play on GNUFor the African animal gnu see wildebeest. logo Believed to be the original artwork of Etienne Suvasa GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix". The GNU project was launched in 1983 by Richard Stallman with the goal of creating a complete operating and NutellaNutella is the brand-name of a chocolate and hazelnut spread created in the 1940s by Ferrero (best known for their Ferrero Rocher sweets which are filled with Nutella). It is used for sandwiches among other things. It is popular in Europe, less so in the. 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. Gnutella is not associated with the GNU projectFor the African animal gnu see wildebeest. logo Believed to be the original artwork of Etienne Suvasa GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix". The GNU project was launched in 1983 by Richard Stallman with the goal of creating a complete operating; see GNUnetGNUnet is a framework for decentralized, peer-to-peer networking. The framework offers link-level encryption, peer discovery and resource allocation. The primary application at this point is anonymous, censorship-resistant file-sharing, allowing users to for the GNU project's equivalent.
