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Concept
Gnutella
Summary
Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model.
In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million computers increasing to over three million nodes by January 2006. In late 2007, it was the most popular file-sharing network on the Internet with an estimated market share of more than 40%.
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. 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, under the GNU General Public License (GPL); however, the original developers never got the chance to accomplish this purpose.
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 free and open source clones began to appear. This parallel development of different clients by different groups remains the modus operandi of Gnutella development today.
Among the first independent Gnutella pioneers were Gene Kan and Spencer Kimball, who 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.
The Gnutella network is a fully distributed alternative to such semi-centralized systems as FastTrack (KaZaA) and the original Napster. The 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 scalability.
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Related concepts (16)
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. This forms a peer-to-peer network of nodes. Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts.
File sharing
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include removable media, centralized servers on computer networks, Internet-based hyperlinked documents, and the use of distributed peer-to-peer networking. File sharing technologies, such as BitTorrent, are integral to modern media piracy, as well as the sharing of scientific data and other free content.
BitTorrent
BitTorrent is a communication protocol for (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and s over the Internet in a decentralized manner. To send or receive files, users use a BitTorrent client on their Internet-connected computer. A BitTorrent client is a computer program that implements the BitTorrent protocol. BitTorrent clients are available for a variety of computing platforms and operating systems, including an official client released by Rainberry, Inc.