"Both the beauty and danger of Gnutella are that it is a more sophisticated version of Napster, the infamous and popular program that college students have been using to swap music files over the Web. Napster's developers have recently been hit with a flurry of copyright-infringement lawsuits. But unlike users of Napster, Gnutella aficionados can trade files without going through a storage center, making it impossible to shut down the system without unplugging every computer on the network and difficult to control by laws because there's no central authority."

"Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape Communications and a former chief technology officer for AOL, compares Gnutella to a benevolent virus, a "revolutionary" program that spreads the power of publishing from an elite set of corporations to anyone who has a computer."

"Napster's huge underground success has unleashed the maverick concept of creating a shared online library of free songs.

Now, a new program called Scour Exchange takes the Napster concept and extends it to photos, videos and feature-length films."

"Programs we forbid:

Anything, which uses the Xing codec to compress so AudioCatalyst is definitely out for compressing WAVs. Also Virtuoso Gold tends to make the MP3s screwy (?!?) or Real Player Real Jukebox (uses the Xing codec). Why is this? Simple, because Xing has a nasty habit of killing off the ambiance of your source recording, therefore making the end MP3s horrible to listen to. In a sense, it makes your high/low ends washed or warble, thereby it doesn't sound as clean on a typical high-end stereo system. Also, apparently MusicMatch Jukebox does use a form of the Fraunhoffer codec, but it also tends to ruin the MP3s when it compresses. User beware! "

> I was delighted to read this article by Joel Brodsky
> (http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$113). It had some
> great stuff about what kind of business you want to be in.
>
> It definitely captured a lot of things that have been true of O'Reilly.

It also captured a lot of things that were true of Netscape as well (which was definitely a company on the Amazon.com model):
"When you are growing faster than about 100% per year, it is simply impossible for mentors to transmit corporate values to new hires. ...Netscape is the most egregious example of this, growing from 5 to about 2000 programmers in one year. As a result, their culture was a mishmash of different people with different values about the company, all tugging in different directions."
"I'm a firm believer in the importance of corporate culture as promoted in books like "Built to Last" (which is why I was one of the instigators of the values stuff at Netscape), so it's interesting to speculate how this dynamic would play out in the current era. At first glance it seems as if no one has any time anymore to wait around for a business to grow organically, so it's difficult to see how any "dot-com" today could in fact build a coherent and enduring culture."

"Building a company? You've got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you're in, and gear everything you do accordingly, or you're going to have a disaster on your hands.

The decision? Whether to grow slowly, organically, and profitably, or whether to have a big bang with very fast growth and lots of capital."

"With the Ben and Jerry's model, if you're even reasonably smart, you're going to succeed. It may be a bit of a struggle, there may be good years and bad years, but unless we have another depression, you're certainly not going to lost too much money, because you didn't put in too much to begin with.

The trouble with the Amazon model is that all anybody thinks about is Amazon. And there's only one Amazon. You have to think of the other 95% of companies which spend an astonishing amount of venture capital and then simply fail because nobody wants to buy their product. At least, if you follow the Ben and Jerry's model, you'll know that nobody wants your product long before you spend more than one MasterCard's worth of credit limit on it.

"So far, the file-sharing software program and others like it have been used primarily to download digital music. However, as the Net overcomes today's size and speed barriers, these technologies could be used to trade everything from full-length movies to computer operating systems--basically, anything that can take a digital form."

"Already transcending music, Napster's wildfire popularity is forcing whole industries to reconsider their business models. Companies are realizing that the last shelter for the digital economy may be imaginative strategies that make use of widespread file-sharing rather than fight it, just as most content companies abandoned online subscriptions for free Web sites years ago."

"Gnutella is gaining popularity quickly and has already been featured in several mass media outlets. As it stands now it provides an almost ideal environment for the spread of self-replicating malicious agents with the additional bonus of providing anonymous control. With full source available, parties previously unable to craft a worm of their own now have a robust framework to build on."

"For the Philippines, on the other hand, the "Love Bug" and the hacker subculture that it exposed are an embarrassing advertisement of the country's programming talent and infant dot-com scene. They also raised the issue of the cost of Internet access for developing countries struggling to close a daunting technology gap with richer countries.

While maintaining that he meant no harm, de Guzman said that Internet access should be free and that charging for its use was immoral. In his thesis, which his college rejected, he introduced his program by saying it would help many people "spend more time on the Internet without paying."