Talk:Gnutella/Archive 1

Frostwire drop gnutella Support

Just fyi: http://torrentfreak.com/frostwire-kills-gnutella-to-go-all-bittorrent-110627/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.203.157.24 (talk) 00:11, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

List of Software

I find it a bit ridiculous that the list of Gnutella software makes up for about 30% of the article although it's pretty insignificant information. If nobody objects, I'll move the list to a secondary article List of Gnutella Software in a while. That way everybody can add his favourite and it won't clobber up the Gnutella article. --82.141.60.62 17:02, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't see any reason to split it from the article. This is a relatively small article and it can easily handle the list provided. - Tεxτurε 17:03, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Would you find a list of automobile vendors useful in an article about "Car"? I don't think lists itself are of encyclopedic value (except for directory entries or meta-articles maybe) and a screenful of such a list is beyond what I consider appropriate. Whether the list items here are really of significant value is quite questionable for example Xolox has been unmaintained and dead for years. In an article that provides a generic list that really doesn't matter but here it clobbers the article and distracts from the actual content. I even suspect that some entries exist only for publicity reasons. So to prevent an annoying discussion about which clients should be listed, I suggest to put the whole list elsewhere so that it doesn't disturb and may be excessive. Those vendors which provided sigificant contributions to the development of Gnutella are mentioned in the article anyway. --82.141.60.62 18:55, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

I have copied and updated the list in Comparison_of_Gnutella_software. However, I have removed older clients. Ie, if they have not been updated in three years, they will not connect to the current network. This article is also in the "See Also" section. I tend to agree that the list detracts from the article. It is fairly easy to click a link. Bpringlemeir 16:40, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

User:217.227.85.218 wanted to put Phex, gtk-gnutella and LimeWire at the top. I don't think we should deviate from alphabetical order. I agree that many of the clients are extraneous. See the Comparison of Gnutella software. I would recommend that clients unable to connect to the current network should be removed from the list, but they should be kept in alphabetic order to avoid bias. For instance, the most popular client will always be available for Windows due to user count. Please help with the Comparison of Gnutella software (and possibly remove antiquated software from the list). Please don't re-order the list without discussing a rational here first. Bpringlemeir 20:25, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

I have merged Comparison of Gnutella software (see history)and added a List of Historical Gnutella Clients wiki. No one discussed anything here about the merge tag since June. Some of the clients in the main list are historical and should be moved. Bpringlemeir 00:49, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

I think that the latest Release of Shareaza should be upped too 2.2.5.0. I'm a member of the Shareaza community, and in fact we only make a difference between debug and release. Releases are the one with at least one zero on the end, and debugs are the one without a zero at the end. This difference is made because releases do not contain a debug database and a bigger binary (which is useful for developers to debug, but will increase the installers size 2 or 3 times). Debug versions do contain them. This change should be made because 2.2.1.0 was actually a bad release, with a lot of bugs harming the networks. If you advertise 2.2.1.0, instead of 2.2.5.0, it'll keep on bugging the networks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.83.226.84 (talk) 12:33, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Then go to the Shareaza wiki and change the software info box to the right of the page. It has a latest release and a preview release. Click on the +/- and you can change the revision numbers (and dates). It is very nice if you provide references (URL with ChangeLog, etc) in a "<!-- Comment -->" or in the edit summary. Bpringlemeir 14:16, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Wikisource editors want to delete GnuFU

The Gnutella For Users user guide hyperlinked to by this article has just come up for deletion at Wikisource. You may wish to consider hyperlinking to the original, wherever it is on the World Wide Web, instead. Uncle G 10:19, 13 November 2005 (UTC)

Number of users

The estimated number of concurrent Gnutella users on Slyck.com is nothing else but the value as provided by LimeWire's crawler: http://www.limewire.com/english/content/netsize.shtml

As you can see these values have not been updated for almost half a year. Rest assured that despite all FUD, the number of Gnutella users is still growing. I believe the methods and accuracy to determine these figures differ quite a lot between the networks. They are not neccessarily comparable. Thus, there isn't really any point in starring at those values, consider them as the undeniable truth and update the article constantly. Actually, I wonder whether it's a good idea to copy whatever given values from whatever website without knowning who and how they have been estimated. --82.141.60.248 15:06, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

The network is substantially larger than 2.2 million users, although it is not tivial to determine its true size. I have written a small crawler tool to count users (I'm somewhat hesitant to publish it) but I can prove that the average size is somewhere between 5 and 10 million unique hosts. --137.226.77.2 21:29, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

having done some independant research into this area with my own crawler I can speak to the number of hosts on the network, like all network services usage statistics are different depending on the time of day and week that you check...on a school night (sunday-thursday) I see between 200 and 500 thousand users on at any given time, that number spikes around 100 thousand users as the western hemisphere hits nightly prime time, on weekends (friday-saturday) that number easily spikes to around 1 to 1.5 million (although I've seen it as high as 2+ million at times)...if anyone is really interested in arguing this to the very specifics i can get actual numbers and post my methodology but it'll take me some time --Michael Lynn

I believe something the casual reader will miss is that this number is the amount of concurrent users online. The number of people using Gnutella in general is magnitudes larger. --82.141.58.164 21:31, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

this is a good point to make, I can also speak to this although to get more specific numbers I'll have to check my data again as I dont remember, but the number of unique hosts on the network (not concurrently logged on) is closer to 10 million, however that data is bound to be scewed by dyanmic ip addressing and the like, if its really of interest i have ways of fingerprinting individual users but again it would take some time --Michael Lynn

I agree these numbers are a bunch of BS. Bpringlemeir 16:45, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Are there any more realistic (and more actual) numbers? On thepiratebay's tracker there are ~ 10,000,000 online at any given moment (and that's just for one site) so either gnutella has WAY more users than those ~2 million given here, or it has immensely lost market share (40% in 2007??).

Yes, these estimations are very bad and should be removed. BitTorrent are a far more popular protocol. See good sources such as http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/18/bittorrent_measurements_analysis/ 129.16.22.21 (talk) 10:29, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Anyways, those figures are mere estimations so how about just removing them as I doubt they are of any use for anyone this way?

In regard to the preceding unsigned comment. There are many scholarly crawlers such as ion-sampler, etc that appear in peer reviewed networking journals giving the Gnutella population sizes that are mentioned in the Gnutella article circa 2010. Bpringlemeir (talk) 20:10, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Gene Kan

he was one of the first to create an application to use the gnutella network and he's not mentioned on this page.. he later committed suicide.. worth mentioning

Wired story, Wikipedia entry. The client wasn't that popular, but anyone can modify wiki pages. I think that there are many people who are important to the development of Gnutella. I think that people have a tendency to glorify those who died. An entry on Gene Kan by itself would not make sense. There are many other people who have contributed to the Gnutella protocol. They shouldn't be punished for not committing suicide. Bpringlemeir 13:31, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Pronunciation of "Gnutella"

Since this information is repeatedly remove from the article: Non-English speakers often pronounce Gnutella with a non-silent "G", for example, Germans and French. Gnutella is not an English "word", thus there's no right or wrong pronunciation. This might be hard to imagine for people who know only English and those might actually be confused when people talk about something that sounds like "Nutella" (the hazelnut spread). In other languages there's a clearly audible difference between "Gnutella" and "Nutella". If the original authors thought of this a joke (most-likely), it only works for native English speakers.

Insofar as GNU is pronounced "guh-noo", I've always pronounced it "guh-noo-tella". I'm an english speaker, FWIW. - 74.112.174.10 19:22, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Add/remove Acqlite?

An anon just removed teh Acqlite entry with the edit summary: "Acqlite is an illegal stolen version of Acquisition and should not be represented.".

I don't know anything about Acqlite, so I won't revert, but it's a strange edit summary, so can someone else have a look? [1]

The removed entry was just "| Acqlite || Mac OS X || GNU GPL". Gronky 04:31, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

I don't really know anything about acqlite, but I do know a little about acquisition, it reports its user agent as "LimeWire/4.9.30 (Acquisition/122)", LimeWire is GPL...I'll take a look at it a little closer and see if its just another in a long line of GPL rips, but that is my suspition, and if its true then I see no reason to remove another client GPL just because its a "stolen" version of what would basically be a stolen version of limewire... --Michael Lynn

I restored Acqlite last night, but I've only just noticed this discussion, so sorry if I was premature. The license situation with Acquisition is a bit subtle: basically the program's split into two processes -- one with GPL code and one without -- which communicate through Unix pipes, so the author believes that it's not a GPL violator. Other people disagree though. There's a discussion about this on the Acquisition talk page if you're interested. Anyway, Acqlite is a fork by one of the people who think Acquisition ought to be released under the GPL. Epimorph 16:23, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

hmm, thats an interesting argument to be made, did they have to modify the gpl code in order to make it use this IPC mechanism, if so then surely that change would have to fall under the GPL, but IANAL, so I can't comment further, with regards to removing a client because it has been aledged to be infrenging I think that any such contraversy is cause for posting it on wikipedia and perhaps even writing more about it, it's not our place to deside what is and isnt infrenging, but if its a current issue related to the protocol and the p2p network then i'd say its worth talking about --Michael Lynn

Additional "See also" link

I know this is about software and the links all relate to other computer related things, but should I add a link to Nutella, as in the spread?--Maier 03 01:18, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

MP3Rocket

Greetings... my addition of MP3Rocket to the clients list was undid due to it being a scam. While I'm not going to disagree on that point in the least, I will note that it is a Gnutella client, and it does have an orphaned article which could use a little bit of sunlight.

Given this, I will re-add the link and suggest anyone who has more experience with MP3Rocket or whatnot (e.g. 82.141.49.41) update the page accordingly. I will, however, list the license as unknown... Rtucker 21:22, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Comparison to Kad

So what are the differences between Gnutella and the Kad Network? Shinobu 15:27, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

Read Kademlia and Structured versus Unstructured. Gnutella will have a DHT added; actually, I believe that LimeWire has already added it in their latest version. Bpringlemeir 14:21, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

Weasel Words

...it is still one of the most successful file-sharing protocols to date.

how do you measure success? The wording is a bit weasely to me. --Echosmoke 18:41, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Yes, those are weasel words. However, it is still functioning seven years after its first deployment and it has been in the top five population counts most of the time. However, currently p2p networks have gotten so large it is hard to measure populations and many people find them suspect to begin with. You can remove those lines. However, I find it hard to believe that you would find this article full of weasel words, compared to the G2 article (or many other articles I have read ) and it is at least based on facts not cited in the article. Bpringlemeir 04:57, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Please stop bashing the Gnutella2 article as "weasel words" and "biased". Yes, it needs a cleanup. Yes, it needs cites. But I made sure I made the article as neutral and factual as I could. Every single time you run around and insult that article... well gee, it's not nice. Also, at this point I'm beginning to consider it a personal attack on my integrity. Please stop. -FrYGuY 06:18, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

The article isn't entirely written by you, so how could this be a personal attack? The G2 article is not neutral or it would mention some of the facts above. For instance, the Gnutella network has five times (or more) peers than G2 in the network comparison. Personally, I am afraid to edit the G2 page as anything I write would seem to create an edit war. I am only trying to point other people to that page to assay whether it is neutral or not. WP:Avoid weasel words and WP:NPOV are part of Wikipedia. How could I not discuss this? However, I am sorry I mentioned G2. Bpringlemeir 14:06, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Also, I question my own objectivity, which is another reason that I would like someone else to look at it. I hope you don't find that too sinister and assume good faith. Bpringlemeir 14:31, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

Actually, the gnutella2 article is, in fact, almost entirely written by me. But, if you feel an entry on average network size is encyclopedic, feel free to add it, but I'll share a few reasons why I didn't add network size into the Gnutella2 article... one, it's not a fixed number. Both Gnutella and Gnutella2 change size with factors such as time and season (Both the networks tend to get smaller during the summer, and is generally larger during US work hours). Neither have accurate crawlers which can tell you authoritatively the size of the network. Gnutella's populaton, for instance, was at one point vastly under-counted (To the tune of almost 4 out of 5 nodes being uncounted), while at another point, before it had a real crawler, Gnutella2's was vastly over-counted (to the tune of each node being counted as many as three times), and at least during one point, the counting differences lead to people parroting that Gnutella2, mere months old, was larger. The figures from the only somewhat accurate crawler for Gnutella that I know of is no longer running, or at least no longer publicly displays the data. Gnutella2's only somewhat accurate crawler is often down. Mostly, I figure that the sizes of self-organizing ad-hoc networks is kind of pointless since people leave and join constantly, faster than even the best of crawlers can keep track of them. Yes, Gnutella is anywhere from three to five times larger than Gnutella2. But I don't really see why that's really important since a) both actively try to keep you from contacting the network unless necessary, b) Both networks change in size pretty drastically depending on time, season, phase of the moon, and color of the pants you're wearing, c) The results of a crawl of either network can return fairly significant differences in terms of assumed network size, depending on your assumptions (Limewire's crawler and Aenea have some pretty decent work in trying to calculate the network size accurately, but at the end of the day, they're both really just educated guesses with some evidence to back it up) and d) The actual size difference is pretty hard to measure when you can't accurately or precisely determine the size of EITHER network!

Back on the topic of Gnutella, I would heartily agree with the statement that it is one of the most successful file sharing protocols to date for a few reasons. One, it was the first ad-hoc self-organizing file sharing network, meaning that it didn't rely on a central server. Second, its popularity has remained pretty significant even as other networks have waxed and waned... FastTrack, Overnet, WinMX. It still has a number of clients which are popular in their own right: Gnucleus, LimeWire, Shareaza, Morpheus... I wouldn't say that they're 'weasel words', as the point (At least, some possible meanings of the phrase) is verifiable, although it is vague. Perhaps defining "success" in this context? Network size? Longevity? Total network bandwidth? All of the above? Gnutella is 'successful' in all three metrics, but to varying degrees of success, as well as varying degrees of verifiability...

As far as assuming good faith, I don't believe you have any particular agenda you're trying to push, or intentionally meant to demean me. I was simply annoyed that you chose to use my article (I did, as I mentioned, write most of the current version in one go, with most of the changes since then style and organization, and as such I'm rather paternal over it. Character flaw of mine, I 'spose) as a throw away 'weasel-y' article after the discussion we had on NPOV on the Gnutella2 article... it's the way it is because it tries to represent both the Gnutella Developer Forum's view of "Mike's Protocol", as well as the Gnutella2 developer's view. It's not "some people say" or "critics say" without citations of developers of one of the two categories (wherever I was asked for citations, in fact), and an explicit notation of WHO was saying the opinions. I really did strive to make sure that I didn't paint too bleak OR too rosy a picture of the network... to show both of the important viewpoints of the network, AND to show both the advantages and disadvantages compared with the network which it forked from. I really pride myself on being as neutral as I can possibly be, to the extent that while during the Gnutella2/Mike's Protocol flame wars, on the now defunct BearShare forums, Vinnie complimented me (That's how I took it, at least) as being 'not a fanboy', during a time where he flamed anybody saying ANYTHING positive about ANYTHING related to Shareaza, despite having been defending the decision and technical merits, and I wore that as a badge of pride, and STILL do... so when people come along, and describe what I tried to make as neutral, factual, and useful as possible as "biased point of view", it struck deep. The quality of the article, sure. I'll be the first to admit it needs work, and can use fleshing out. It's been a long time since the article was written, and in the almost THREE YEARS (Will be that long in less than three weeks) since I wrote it, both networks have evolved, Wikipedia's style has changed, much of the surrounding environment has changed (For instance, much of the discussion on BearShare's forums is lost for the ages, as is everything that was on Shareaza's old forums). But I took particular offense when your first change was to mark what I took particular care to write neutrally with NPOV, and now again with "Weasel Words", when both of those are things I made sure was as minimal as I could make it.

Wow, this has turned into a really long note. Summary: I don't think you're a bad person or necessarily meaning offense. -FrYGuY 05:54, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

woops..you two, have a cup of tea ;) Now, i didnt even want to question the success of gnutella, also am not implying the article is "full of". I just would prefer if there was some reasoning added like

• exists for 7(?) years (longer than X, Y)
• still active and functioning
• user statistics (3rd biggest?) (yes pretty questionable, no matter what source)
• several clients (actually a load of ;) ) still developed further
• still more in use than its (non-)successor G2 (if that can be established firmly - to me its obvious)

--Echosmoke 04:31, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Agreed, it's certainly vague. -FrYGuY 05:54, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

That is the point of WP:Avoid weasel words. Ie, use facts and not generalized statements. I guess Weasel words sounds insulting. I thought it was clear from context that it was a Wikipedia guideline. Weasel words can be true, there are just better ways of saying it.

Regarding Gnutella being the third biggest, that might have been true at one point. It is very difficult to count after clients run in the millions. Nobody seems to do this recently as it is too problematic to get accurate results. There is no real way to determine the size of BitTorrent networks (or all BitTorrent clients running). Also no one can measure Dark Nets, private Http and Ftp sights, and Usenet binaries newsgroups as a file sharing mechanisms. Generally, the all end up being connected, either by multi-protocol clients or by people running multiple applications. However, Gnutella is one of the major file sharing networks, but that is a moving target as FryGuy has stated. Bpringlemeir 17:10, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

I find it ridiculous that FastTrack is still supposed to be the second largest P2P file-sharing network. Is there any evidence for this at all? You don't have trust LimeWire's crawler reports. Others, for example, Daniel Stutzbach have confirmed a peer population of over 2 million peers in 2006. Papers on Gnutella --217.87.79.182 01:34, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

If you reread the opening, it says, roughly, that Gnutella has stayed about the third most popular peer-to-peer file transfer method, as the decline in popularity of FastTrack roughly coincided with the rise in BitTorrent, meaning that as it passed one, another passed it... in other words, it's still third, but instead of being behind ED2k and FastTrack, it's now behind ED2k and BitTorrent. -FrYGuY 10:09, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

I read it carefully. BitTorrent is no network. Hence it implies the relative order is unchanged. --217.87.79.182 18:50, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Technically, each torrent is its own network. However, it's often implied that the aggregate of these networks is considered BitTorrent's "Network size". Of course, with BitTorrent being vastly harder to count than Gnutella (Which, as I mentioned before, is already incredibly hard to count), the 'measured size' of all these networks is pretty much just a pissing contest. -FrYGuY 01:22, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Well, then each FTP or web server is one network too. It's just not very P2Py. The values are not about the amount of people using some P2P network but about the amount of concurrent peers connected to it any time on average. Comparing BitTorrent with these other networks does not make much sense as you admit yourself because it's a different concept with a different topology. A BitTorrent network is not more than a swarm for a given file, Any Gnutella peer has usually multiple of these swarms but this is not the number given here. It is about peers connected to the Gnutella network itself and nobody ever counted the population by taking swarms into account. Technically, you don't have to be connected to Gnutella at all in order to be part of a Gnutella swarm. In fact, Shareaza, for example, allows the user to disconnect from Gnutella altogether but it may still appear as uploader or downloader in a Gnutella swarm because it does not clearly separate G2 swarm from Gnutella swarms. Actually, it's a bit worse in so far that it may leech from Gnutella sources but not upload to them. So if you think swarm population should be taken into account too, you may get different numbers anyway. You claim, it's hard to count Gnutella peers. That may be true but nobody counts them. They are estimated, That's a difference. If you had looked at some of the papers, you'd see that there's little doubt about the accuracy when using the methods shown in these papers. The estimations for Gnutella are in fact the most accurate of all the networks and the only ones that you can find references for. The others are simply claimed values with no credible evidence. You also seem to assume that all networks are mutually exclusive. This is nonsense. Gnutella and BitTorrent can be considered complementary because both have different characteristics. Many of those who have used Gnutella before are still using it, just to a lesser extend and maybe only if BitTorrent fails them. Thus BitTorrent may still be on the rise and has taken a large portion of the cake but people have not abandoned Gnutella at all. "People with cars don't stop walking." While I can't prove it, I'd even claim the impact of spamming and spoofing had much larger impact on Gnutella than people "converting" to BitTorrent. What I'm trying to say is, attempt to look at the big picture and don't jump to overly simple conclusions. Wikipedia is not the place to claim, assume or speculate. If you don't have the values, don't understand the methods, just don't claim things. Also don't underestimate the amount of lies spread for commercial purposes. If some business who sells BitTorrent technology claims 50% of all traffic is BitTorrent, you have to take that with a grain or better chunk of salt. It's also funny that people recently noticed HTTP traffic being on the rise but not a single word about Gnutella which has been using HTTP ever since and which is certainly pushing more data than 5 years ago. Instead everybody assumes that's YouTube. This may be true but it's nothing but speculation. --217.87.78.15 16:12, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

Network security

I think that this there is a big part left out, namely the security issues with the Gnutella protocol. There are several scientific articles which emphasise how the Gnutella network can be used (or could, I haven't studied the latest protocol implementations) for DDoS attacks, even on hosts outside of the network. I think it is an important part.

Articles:

• Exploiting the Security Weaknesses of the Gnutella Protocol
• Anonymously Launching a DDoS Attack via the Gnutella Network
• Query-Flood DoS Attacks in Gnutella
• Misusing Unstructured P2P Systems to Perform DoS Attacks: The Network That Never Forgets

(Note that the last two might not be available to everyone (I get access through my university network). 130.243.240.192 (talk) 07:28, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Gnutella Features table

In an attempt to help fill out the Gnutella Features table: I was just at the Phex site and they had Firewall-to-Firewall in their features poll for new features to implement, so should Phex be marked as not having RUDP, rather than being unknown? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zeotronic (talk • contribs) 00:33, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

The Gnutella2 page lists Shareaza as supporting Large file sizes while this table lists it as not. Some checking (or clarification if this is somehow correct) would be nice. 81.134.109.4 (talk) 10:42, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

As I've already downloaded files bigger than 4GB from G2, so it should be possible. ;) Does this settle the matter or does it count as 'own research'?

Greetings, OldDeath (talk) 19:06, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

No, it doesn't. G2 is not Gnutella. The protocols are completely different. Shareaza doesn't support the same feature set for all protocols it supports. An implementation has to support the "GGEP LF" extension and strictly use at least 64-bit wide integers for filesizes and file offsets on all layers (Gnutella protocol, HTTP, file handling) before it can claim to support filesizes larger than 4 GiB. Any legacy implementation can only handle files up to 2 GiB as the original protocol design uses a fixed 32-bit field to encode the filesize and many implementations use signed integers for filesizes and file offsets - therefore the limit of 2 instead of 4 GiB. Hence the need for "GGEP LF" (Large File support). --217.87.63.93 (talk) 18:14, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, then I'm sorry. This misunderstanding was obviously my reasoning error... Thanks for explaining how it works.

mfg, OldDeath (talk) 16:39, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

Gnutella2

The article states that Gnutella2 has "both advantages and disadvanteages" compared to Gnutella.
Could someone plz cite a source for these disadvantages or explain them here?

I understand when there are some tensions between the gnutella and the Gnutella2 camp due to historical reasons but this is no sufficient reason to try to make one or the other protocol seem/look worse without giving appropriate sources.

This old conflict should be solved, IMHO, it has lasted already way too long...

mfg, OldDeath (talk) 21:05, 6 November 2009 (UTC)

Which way are you talking about? I left the 'advantages' of G2 as having a better search mechanism. This was true when G2 was formed (G2 versus query flood). However, in the mean time various other methods of searching Gnutella have been implemented. I can find no scholarly paper that cites the G2 search method is better. The paper that is cited in the G2 page really doesn't say that the G2 depth first is better than the query flood as far as I understand. However, items such as query route protocol, etc have all changed the Gnutella search dynamics. This was the whole reason the argument started. People knew there was a problem, but the G2 implementor got impatient with Gnutella progress and went a head and split the protocol. I tried to express this in the wikipedia article, but some Shareza developer was jumping all over me and I don't really feel like fighting any battles. I am sure that the G2 protocol is better when you use some metric. However, I doubt that it globally superior to Gnutella's current mechanism. Give that there are many more Gnutella peers, the chance of finding content seems greater. Probably your best chance is to use both; however, this probably won't use the least bandwidth possible. From this argument it is fairly easy to see that best, advantage, etc are baiting words. However, the Gnutella article is way, way, way more objective than the G2 article in my opinion. My take was why compare them? The Sharaza developer I was discussing this with at the time said, well they began together so they need to be compared.

There are only a handful of scholarly articles that cite G2 at all. The network is orders of magnitude smaller. Peer counts and client choices are all disadvantages of G2. The peer count difference is well cited. I would be fine not mentioning G2 at all in the Gnutella article if the G2 article wasn't so biased (in my opinion).

Btw, why did you change Gnutella to gnutella everywhere? I think it is a proper name and should be capitalized. I believe that most scholarly articles also use Gnutella and not the lower case variant.

Edit: See section below. My poor form not to have started a new topic.

I would much agree that things would be better if there was no hostility. The lead developer of gtk-gnutella has made changes to help operate within G2. The main Gnutella antagonist was a BearShare lead who has long left the Gnutella forums. LimeWire, Phex and gtk-gnutella developers are all pretty reasonable people as far as I am concerned. To read the G2 page, you would think that anybody who develops for Gnutella was a mad man. Bpringlemeir (talk) 19:47, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Actually, the current G2 page is not so bad in the flame war aspect (previous revisions were much more biased). However, if your read the archives you will find many people trying to reason with 'Mike'. Vinnie, the Bearshare developer, seems to have sabotaged any chance of reasoning by being a complete idiot. However, that is only one developer(peer) in Gnutella world. The current page does seem to say that all Gnutella developer think the same way. Bpringlemeir (talk) 20:00, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

The other Shareza developer/wikipedian being FrYGuY, if I remember correctly. Bpringlemeir (talk) 20:06, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

My comment wasn't meant to restart old discussions, that's why I didn't remove the lines I criticized as being unsourced, but I asked to give sources for them. As I see it, it is proven that G2 is superior to gnutella before the changes you mentioned. However, there has been no proof that I have seem yet that shows that this has partly or entirely changed. However, it is without doubt that there has been improvement on gnutella - but there has also been improvement on G2. Also, from a technical point of view - when it comes to design questions etc. - you cant say that having one order of magnitude (and not orders of magnitude, BTW) less users is a (technical) flaw/disadvantage of the network. In fact, downloads on G2 seem to be faster then on gnutella (or at least, that's what my subjective view shows me), but I can't prove that... OldDeath (talk) 12:34, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

The amount of hosts can be a benefit if you think of content distribution. It depends on what your metrics are. The article doesn't claim a technical advantage. Bpringlemeir (talk) 02:28, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

I see what you mean. The rest of that section was written from a very technical point of view, and I was thinking that this applied to that statement, too. Maybe there should be a slight rewording for others not to fall into the same verbal trap as I did ;) The availability of more network users is certainly an important detail for those trying to find a network that suits best their needs...

mfg, OldDeath - 13:04, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Upper versus lower case

I would suggest that we move the conversation regarding lower and upper case here. Bpringlemeir (talk) 17:44, 19 June 2010 (UTC) I have moved this as it is separate from Old Death original question. 02:03, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

 Btw, why did you change Gnutella to gnutella everywhere?  I think it is a proper name and should be capitalized.  
 I believe that most scholarly articles also use Gnutella and not the lower case variant.

The name "gnutella" is lower-case on purpose. The only time it is capitalized is at the start of a sentence or when referring to the original program by name. When referring to the protocol, it is lower case. Scholarly journals don't get to change it to suit their habits, nor does anybody else. It would be wise to ask before changing something that seems unconventional to you. Aaron Walkhouse (talk) 10:10, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Quote from my user talk page:

Why did you make all of these changes? Bpringlemeir (talk) 20:23, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Because when it started, it was written without caps, like gtk-gnutella is still as of today. Then, there has been the time where people started to capitalize everything and gnutella got hit, even when in the original, it was written with a small 'g'. It seemed appropriate to me to change that back.

You might also wonder why I haven't changed all Gnutella2 occurrences to gnutella2. Well, there are two reasons: 1) It has been capitalized from the beginning, so the cap 'G' is correct over here and 2) because of political reasons: there is a certain movement in the Gnutella2 community into the direction of calling Gnutella2 simply G2 instead, with the goal to put aside the old naming debate etc. and to stop that ongoing tensions (that do still exist, even if lots of new users and devs might not be aware of them)...

mfg, OldDeath (talk) 12:34, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

So, the rational is that the original Wikipedia article used lower case? The GDF documentation refer to it a "Gnutella" mid sentence. Did you have a reference supporting the use of lower case? My only point is that most if not all references use the upper case version. Also, the article titles and attributions from other sources should not have the case changed. gtk-gnutella is not gnutella. I don't understand why you (Aaron, Old Death) keep mentioning it. The [first revision] of the Gnutella document uses the upper case version mid-sentence. Thanks, Bpringlemeir (talk) 17:29, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

I saw it lowercased in... 2003 or earlier. 83.25.80.177 (talk) 18:14, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

[Archive.org] has still the old wego address, which predates The GDF. It's lowercase. Ce3c (talk) 22:23, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

There is an old link here..http://web.archive.org/web/20000620113133/http://www.gnutella.wego.com/ this predates the GDF.. see the logo.. it's lower case.Kathphlox (talk) 22:27, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

OK, we can continue over here. Aaron and me keep referring to the name of gtk-gnutella (even if it is not gnutella itself), as the name was written in small letters because the protocol was at the time the name was created, too. BTW, Aaron has been around in the gnutella filesharing community for a long time. I've seen that name already years ago on several P2P software forums (I suppose the user I remember on those forums is the same one) and he is still as of today, so he should be knowing what he is talking about. ;)

mfg, OldDeath - 18:10, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Right, well the 'Wego' page does have gnutella in the title, but then proceeds to use the upper case version in about 12 other places many of them mid-sentence. I also seem to remember this issue. However, there are 1000's of sources where Gnutella is capitalized including interviews with Justin Frankel. Bpringlemeir (talk) 02:14, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

In early 2001, the only place where lowercase gnutella was used on wego was changed to uppercase. The lowercase instances are host names. I no longer care, so I won't revert any edits, but if someone comes looking for a rational here, I still don't think one was provided. Bpringlemeir (talk) 02:20, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

No problem. But I'll try to convince you anyway, as I don't like parting with unsettled matters... That's not how I usually try to solve problems... ;) I'll collect additional information and post it at this place...

mfg, OldDeath - 13:07, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

If you want it to stand the test of time, you had better provide a rational given the wide range of external sources that use upper case. I would also suggest that a brief rational be provided in the article. The issue seems familiar to me, but I think this is the 2nd time this has been tried as I recall. I thought the original person to do this was Aaron, but I could be mistaken. Bpringlemeir (talk) 15:13, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Once I get some more information (I've send some emails out into the void and I'm hoping to get some answers back), I'll add a statement about the reason for spelling it with a small 'g' to the article.

BTW, I didn't know about that this is the second time this change has been applied to the article... Could you check the article's history for details?

mfg, OldDeath - 17:55, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

PS.: See the giFT article. I hadn't saved it yet when you did you edit, because I was still researching about how to do the redirect from the OpenFT network article best.

EDIT: Good job! You've really improved the G2 section.

It may have been gtk-gnutella or an old version of giFT (in regards to upper/lower case). I can not find it in the gnutella page although I didn't look through every edit. I recall there being a technical limitations disclaimer and then some one else capitalizing everything and this going back and forth for a week and then it stabilizing. I was just an observer and wondered why people cared either way. It is also possible that it was in a completely different wiki. My memory was that it was the gnutella page, so I was thinking "not this again". Hence I wanted a rational before it was changed. I didn't expect such a fast response and I figured there will be many edits before you got back to the issue. This is why I undid the initial change. It does make it slightly difficult to compare histories when people do this. Bpringlemeir (talk) 21:24, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

I don't know. I've only been watching Wikipedia pages since I registered over here around a year ago and I don't remember an edit war around that subject happening on any of the articles in question, during the time I was actively watching them - and during the first month, almost all the important pages about filesharing via gnutella, G2 and eD2k went on my watchlist... I consider it being a good thing you undid my first edit, as this has lead to a very fruitful discussion and an amelioration of some articles (I improved some other articles while changing "Gnutella" to "gnutella", BTW).

BTW, I saw you changed something about Shareaza being the first G2 client. Well, that statement was true, as it was the first client where G2 has ever been implemented in, as the lead dev of Shareaza at that time (Michael Stokes) invented G2...

mfg, OldDeath - 22:05, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

PS.: I've just got an email reply from Justin Frankel with a statement on the naming debate. I'll post it over here once I got the permission to do so from him.

The distinction between upper and lower case is not without precedent. From Perl:

When referring to the language, the name is normally capitalized (Perl) as a proper noun, as you would a spoken language (e.g. English or French). When referring to the interpreter program itself, the name is often uncapitalised (perl) because most Unix-like file systems are case-sensitive.

Similar situation is with AWK, and likely there are more examples. Not sure whether this is applicable to gnutella/Gnutella, but that's my 2 cents anyway. GregorB (talk) 07:14, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

If I recall correctly there was a discussion on The_GDF about it way back in the beginning. I wonder if I can find it again... Aaron Walkhouse (talk) 13:28, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

As I've got the agreement to post what he said now... I mailed Justin Frankel and he said that both versions of the name were used at the beginning and both are fine.

mfg, OldDeath - 14:34, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Err, if both are fine and most academic papers, public books on file sharing, popular press and the GDF papers use upper case, then why convert all of Wikipedia to lower case? Still not really convinced that this made sense, but I am too lazy to change it back. Bpringlemeir (talk) 20:01, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

MP3 Rocket

Does anyone recall what is the latest version of MP3 Rocket before they dropped their gnutella support? Their latest version template indicates this being v5.2.3 released in June 22, 2009 (2009-06-22), however there are reviews available on the web for example for v5.3.6.0 that indicate the program having still been a gnutella servant at the time of that release...
mfg, OldDeath - 16:31, 19 May 2011 (UTC)