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 free and open source gnutella client Gnucleus.
In late 2001, the gnutella client LimeWire Basic became free and 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 on the protocol (first implemented in proprietary and closed source clients) allowed an improvement in scalability. This growing surge in popularity revealed the limits of the initial protocol's scalability. Initial popularity of the network was spurred on by Napster's threatened legal demise in early 2001. The gnutella network is a fully distributed alternative to such semi-centralized systems as FastTrack ( KaZaA) and the original Napster. This parallel development of different clients by different groups remains the modus operandi of gnutella development today.Īmong the first independent Gnutella pioneers were Gene Kan and Spencer Kimball, they launched the first portal aimed to assemble the open-source community to work on Gnutella, and also developed "GNUbile", one of the first open-source (GNU-GPL) programs to implement the Gnutella protocol. This did not stop gnutella after a few days, the protocol had been reverse engineered, and compatible free and open source clones began to appear. The next day, AOL stopped the availability of the program over legal concerns and restrained Nullsoft from doing any further work on the project. The source code was to be released later, under the GNU General Public License (GPL), however the original developers never got the chance to accomplish this purpose. The event was prematurely announced on Slashdot, and thousands downloaded the program that day. On March 14, the program was made available for download on Nullsoft's servers. The first client (also called Gnutella) from which the network got its name was developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft in early 2000, soon after the company's acquisition by AOL.
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