Shareaza

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

~ the obit ~

On 19 December 2007 shareaza.com stopped pointing at Shareaza. The address began serving a page that called itself the official home of Shareaza and offered a download named Shareaza V4, which was an iMesh client with the graphics changed. The people who had written the actual software had no part in it and no way to get the address back.

Shareaza was a Windows file-sharing client written by Michael Stokes and first released in 2002. What set it apart was that it spoke to more than one network at a time, starting with Gnutella and adding Gnutella2, then eDonkey and BitTorrent, all behind one search box. Stokes designed Gnutella2 himself in late 2002, which made him unpopular with part of the Gnutella developer community and did not slow the client down at all. On 1 June 2004 he released version 2.0 under the GPL and handed the code to a volunteer team.

The domain was lost through a settlement rather than a break-in. Its registrant, Jon Nilson, gave it up as part of an agreement with the French record producers' body, and it passed to Discordia Ltd, a Cyprus shell company connected to iMesh. On 10 January 2008 Discordia filed a United States trademark application for the word Shareaza, claiming first commercial use on 17 December 2007, two days before the redirect went live. The development team raised donations to fight the filing and eventually stopped, and the mark went to iMesh. A separate domain complaint at WIPO was refused on 29 July 2009 because the complainant could not demonstrate trademark rights predating the people who had just taken the name.

The odd thing about a hijack like that, watching from outside the fight, is how little a front page was ever worth. Nobody I knew got file-sharing software from a company's homepage. It arrived from a download list on a forum, or from a link somebody pasted into a thread, and whatever the installer was called by the time it reached you was the name it had. Discordia bought the one asset with almost no bearing on how the software actually traveled outside the English-speaking web, and the real client kept being pulled off SourceForge by people who never heard about any of it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ four networks in one window ~

The pitch was consolidation. By 2004 the file-sharing world had split into networks that did not talk to each other, so a file that was thick on eDonkey might be missing from Gnutella entirely, and running three clients meant three sets of settings and three windows fighting over the same upstream. Shareaza indexed by hash across all of them, which meant a download could pull chunks from an eDonkey source and a Gnutella source at once, and a search returned one merged list.

It was also unusually clean for the category. No adware and no bundled toolbar, and no paid tier waiting behind a free one that had been deliberately crippled, which in 2004 was rare enough to be the first thing anybody said about it. That reputation is exactly what made the name worth stealing three years later.

~ what discordia was for ~

Buying dead peer-to-peer brands turned out to be a business. By 2009 the same interests held bearshare.com and the lphant domain alongside shareaza.com, each pointed at a variation of the same paid iMesh client. The logic was straightforward: the lawsuits had already emptied out the software, but the names still had years of typed-in traffic behind them, and somebody arriving at a familiar address expecting a free client would take whatever was offered there.

That is what happened to the users. The people who kept using shareaza.com out of habit downloaded an installer that looked close enough, and got a client that asked for a subscription and reported home. The volunteer team spent 2008 telling anyone who would listen to ignore the address that had been theirs, which is a hard message to deliver when the address is the only part of a project most people can remember.

~ what is still on sourceforge ~

The project outlived the theft by a decade. It moved to shareaza.sourceforge.net and kept shipping, and its last stable build, 2.7.10.2, went out on 18 September 2017. After that the tracker went quiet. A fork called Envy carried on for a while and a developer adopted the code again on GitHub in 2022, which is what happens to GPL software rather than what happens to a product.

shareaza.com has no DNS record at all now. The company that took it stopped paying for it once the traffic it was farming had aged out, so the ending is that neither side has the name. The installer is still sitting on SourceForge, dated 2017, for a set of networks that mostly do not have anything left on them.

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