BearShare

» see bearshare.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

bearshare was the us-leaning gnutella client. in turkey around 2003 to 2005 the file-sharing rotation on a ttnet line was kazaa, then dc++, then limewire if the room you were in had english-speaking music tastes, and torrent trackers from the second they showed up. bearshare was the one i saw on american forum screenshots more than on any turkish friend's desktop.

vincent falco and louis tatta at free peers inc. shipped the first build on the fourth of december 2000. it was a windows-only client for the gnutella network, the decentralized protocol that came out of nullsoft right after the napster lawsuits started. bearshare scaled with the network. by 2003 it was one of the three or four clients people meant when they said gnutella.

the riaa came for it the same way it came for everyone else. in may 2006, after the supreme court grokster decision a year earlier, free peers handed all bearshare-related assets to musiclab llc and used the thirty million dollars from the sale to settle with the labels. that was the death of the original product. what came next was wearing the same name but doing something different.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

gnutella was the answer to the napster shutdown. no central server, no company to sue out of existence, just a swarm of peers passing search queries to each other. bearshare 4.x and 5.x were among the fastest clients on that network. for a college kid in 2002 with a cable modem, the song you typed was usually there inside five minutes.

the limit on that model was that the swarm itself was the product. when limewire arrived with a java client that ran on mac and linux, the bearshare windows-only base started looking narrow. by 2005 limewire was the default. bearshare was the one your older brother had installed and never updated.

~ how it actually ended ~

musiclab released bearshare v6 in august 2006. same name, completely different software: a paid frontend bound to the imesh network with drm-controlled music downloads. the gnutella connectivity was gone. the value proposition was now a legitimate music store competing with the itunes store, which was a losing game from day one.

imesh kept the name limping along through subscription premium tiers until june of 2016, when the bearshare.com download was removed. the official discontinuation page survived until march 2017 and then went dark too.

~ the long tail ~

the gnutella network outlived all of its big-name clients. small open-source projects like gtk-gnutella still talk to it as of the late 2020s. nobody uses it. the music piracy use case lost to youtube ripping, then to spotify, then to the basic fact that an entire generation no longer thinks of music as files you store. bearshare is buried under that whole change.

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