Gnutella

~ the obituary ~

Nobody ever installed Gnutella. You installed LimeWire, or BearShare, or whatever the machine in front of you already had, and the network underneath had no logo and no homepage and no reason to ever say its name to you. That is the unusual thing about this grave. Millions of people used it for a decade without knowing what it was called.

It came out of Nullsoft in early 2000, written by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper, the same building that had made Winamp. AOL had bought the company by then. On 14 March 2000 the client went up for download on Nullsoft's own servers and somebody posted it to Slashdot before anyone was ready, and thousands of copies went out that day. Within twenty-four hours AOL had taken it down and called it an unauthorized freelance project.

The timing explains the panic. AOL was in the middle of merging with Time Warner, and Time Warner was one of the parties suing Napster. Your new parent company cannot be the one shipping the replacement. The name, for what it is worth, is GNU plus Nutella, because the two of them were eating a lot of it and planned to release under the GPL.

I was downloading mp3s in Ankara internet cafes in those years, on machines I did not administer, from whatever client somebody had left on the desktop. I could not tell you which network any of it crossed. That is not a gap in my memory, it is the actual condition of the thing: Gnutella was designed to be the layer nobody had to think about, and it succeeded at that so completely that most of the people carrying it never learned the word.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Napster kept an index on a server. That server had an address, a company behind it and a court that could reach both, which is why Napster took eighteen months to die from the moment the lawsuit landed. Gnutella removed the index. Your client connected to a handful of other clients, your search was passed to your neighbors, their neighbors passed it on again, and anything that matched came back down the same path. There was no company. There was nothing to switch off.

It worked well enough that the network kept growing through the entire period when file sharing was supposed to be dying. June 2005 put it at 1.81 million machines. January 2006 was past three million nodes. By late 2007 it was the most used file-sharing network on the internet with more than forty percent of the traffic, which is a strange position for something its own owner had disowned seven years earlier.

~ the slide ~

The first design flooded every query to every neighbor, which is fine on a whiteboard and ruinous once the network is large. Version 0.6 in 2002 split the population into leaf nodes and ultra nodes, so that machines with real bandwidth carried the search traffic and everyone else hung off them. It fixed the scaling and it quietly reintroduced a hierarchy, which is what the whole thing had been built to avoid.

The other crack was that the protocol was free and the clients were not. LimeWire and BearShare were businesses with offices and lawyers, selling paid versions of a thing anyone could implement. So the network with no company attached ended up depending on companies anyway, and every one of them was suable.

~ the long tail ~

On 26 October 2010 Judge Kimba Wood ordered LimeWire shut down. During the negotiations LimeWire staff had put remote-disabling code into the client, and when it fired, the single largest population on the network disconnected itself. The host count never recovered. What had been millions became tens of thousands and then less than that.

It is still there. gtk-gnutella shipped a stable 1.2.3 in March 2024, and both Shareaza and the WireShare fork of LimeWire still speak the protocol. gnutellaforums.com still answers. This grave is marked dormant for the same reason Usenet is: the network was never turned off, it just stopped being where anybody was. Frankel and Pepper built the one file-sharing system that could not be killed by a lawsuit, and then it was emptied out by a lawsuit against somebody else.

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