yesterday cnet ran a piece on a gnutella portal, which aims to :
“…aims to assemble the open-source programming community’s work on Gnutella, a popular piece of file-swapping software capable of turning anyone with a computer into a music pirate.
Gnutella is similar to online music-sharing program Napster but allows anything in a digital format to be traded–from pirated MP3 music files to grandmothers’ secret pie recipes.
Started by a group of programmers at the America Online-owned Nullsoft, the Gnutella project was shut down after AOL discovered the “unauthorized” development effort. But before AOL’s action, the software escaped into the wild, and programmers around the Net quickly began developing their own sets of “clones” that worked like the original.”
aside from the fact that gnutella isn’t technically open, the article also focuses on the the rather obvious copyright brouhaha and completely neglects issues related to mass market peer-to-peer networking as well as what these programs can do to your bandwidth. of course these problems will only get worse as more and more people get a taste for downloading free ricky martin singles.