🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello everybody.

Source: Wired News

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

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.

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.

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...



Steven