OpenNap

» see opennap.sourceforge.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the napster shutdown in july 2001 left a gap in turkey too. for the turkish technical-university students who had spent late '99 through mid '01 pulling mp3s through whichever pc had a napster install, the question after the central servers went dark was what came next. opennap was one of the answers. it was not the answer that won (the answer that won was kazaa, then bittorrent), but for a window of maybe nine months between mid '01 and early '02 opennap was where you went if you wanted napster-shaped behavior with no napster company.

for me opennap is more memory of the era than memory of the specific client. the relationship between napster and opennap was almost invisible at the user level. the client looked the same. the file lists looked the same. the new step was that you ran napigator (a small directory app) to pick which server your client logged into, and from there everything behaved like napster used to. for the home user on dialup or the internet-cafe user in turkey or anywhere else, you kept doing what you had been doing through 2001 except the servers were different and the network was smaller.

about the technical side. opennap was a server-side reimplementation of the napster protocol, written by a developer who went by drscholl and worked with a small group of contributors. the project showed up in early 1999, before napster itself had been sued. drscholl reverse-engineered the protocol the napster client used to talk to the napster central server, then released a server that any operator could run on their own hardware. anyone with a colocation slot and some bandwidth could be the napster of their corner of the internet.

the practical addition opennap made over napster proper was two things. one, opennap servers could federate. you could link your server to another operator's server and your users could see each other's libraries without ever switching clients. that gave rise to networks of servers running under a coordinator like napigator, which acted as a directory that let clients pick which opennap servers to log into. two, opennap removed the mp3-only restriction. you could share any file type, which made the network usable for software, video, larger archives, basically anything that the napster proper had not allowed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the napster injunction came in february 2001, the central napster servers stopped indexing through the spring, and napster officially shut down on july 11 2001. that summer was when opennap-based networks absorbed the napster refugee population. napigator was the most visible coordinator, listing dozens of opennap servers and letting napster client builds (modified to point at the napigator directory instead of napster.com's servers) keep working. the population of opennap users grew from negligible in early 2001 to roughly 250000 across the largest federated networks by february 2002.

this is the part where turkey was on the curve same as everywhere else, broadly. the universities had decent bandwidth for the era and the dorm-network culture of the early '00s in turkish technical universities was that whichever client worked got installed across the floor. the music-piracy moral question was not yet a thing people talked much about. the technical question was the foreground (which client, which server) and opennap held that slot for roughly the second half of 2001 and the first weeks of 2002 before something killed it.

~ the actual end ~

the something that killed opennap was the riaa legal team. february 2002, just as the network population hit its peak, the riaa started sending cease-and-desist letters to the operators running the largest opennap servers. the strategy was the only one available since opennap had no central company to sue. the riaa had to chase each server operator individually, which would have been impossible against a hundred thousand operators but worked against the dozen or two who actually ran high-traffic servers. those operators mostly shut down their servers within weeks. the federated network collapsed.

the population fell from about 250000 in february 2002 to under 50000 by mid 2002. the kazaa-fasttrack network was already growing as the next-layer replacement, with a properly distributed protocol that did not have a central server to sue. by late 2002 opennap was a residual hobbyist network of maybe a few thousand users on the surviving servers, and the file-sharing audience had moved on. winmx kept its own non-napster protocol running until 2005. limewire and the gnutella network kept going for years after that.

~ the next chapter ~

opennap was a brief shape in the p2p history but a load-bearing one. it kept the napster muscle memory alive for the six months between napster's death and kazaa's arrival, which is why a lot of turkish college students never had to learn a new client during that window. it also showed the riaa-strategy problem with the central-server model: a protocol with central servers, even if those servers are run by anyone, is killable through letters to operators. the next generation of file-sharing networks all moved to genuinely distributed lookup schemes (dht-based) for exactly this reason.

the napigator directory that had been the coordinator front-end disappeared around the same time the opennap servers did. the source code for opennap itself stayed on sourceforge for years, downloadable but not really useful once the operator population had thinned out. drscholl moved on. the napster brand was bought and resold and turned into a paid music service, and now exists as a streaming product owned by a different company. opennap is what remains of the original protocol, in the sense that anyone who wanted to could still spin up a server today and run it. nobody does.

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