Open Source Napster: Gnutella

Luminescent writes "Nullsoft, in their new company, "Gnullsoft", just released an open source Napster clone. It does mp3s, movies, and any other format you could want. " More details: Gnutella is currently at version .48. Presently, they are finishing the version on-hand and will be doing a release at 1, along with the source, which is *not* currently availible. In addition to releasing the source at version 1, they will be releasing the client for other OSes. Presently, it's a Windows-only thing. Despite all of these drawbacks, this is an interesting move from WinAmp->Netscape->AOL->Time-Warner. Or whatever they are today.

Content Discrimination

This has the potential to succeed where Napster has failed. Napster works with only MP3s, which means Napster's designers have applied content discrimination. The law decrees, and IANAL, that as soon as you discriminate against content posted, that you are responsible for all content posted. If this program is much more general-purpose, it shouldn't be dogged by the same laws that Napster was dogged by.

Re:distributed file sharing

Time Warner now sells bandwidth with it's Cable Modem services and it's consolidaiton with AOL. Bandwidth is not unlike Gasoline. You sell enough SUVs (aka Napster) and you'll have lots more gas sales.


Bad Mojo

Re:I'm not overly impressed...

It is like "cruising" down the main drag of a small city. Those doing it complain that they "have the right" to drive anywhere. But what about the rights of the rest of us to drive downtown without running into a wall of cars circling the block?

I'm not saying that things like Napster should be illegal. I am saying that clogging up a network with Napster when people are trying to do real work is antisocial behavior and should be considered on-par with playing a boom-box at volume ten on the bus, talking loudly on a cell-phone in a supermarket, and otherwise acting like an obnoxious ass.

Re:thank you!

Here's my problem, though: at my school, if you live in a dorm, your one option for Internet access is the school's residential network. No DSL, no cable, and for some reason, it's notoriously hard to get a modem connection.

Now, I'm paying a pretty fair sum every semester to Housing and Food Services, and part of that is for my network connection. If you have to limit it in some respect, fine, I believe solutions exist. But it's not fair to block access completely when a more equitable solution would be to block each student to, say, 5 k/s of bandwidth during Napster transfers during peak hours, or whatever.

Napster and its ilk have legitimate uses. No, really, they do. If your solution to their overutilization of bandwidth is shutting them down completely, I can't blame anyone who tries to get around it. Hell, I've tried to get around it. A middle ground exists here, and I'm waiting for someone to stumble onto it.

-jay

No more downloads due to slashdotting!

Check this out! (from the download page)

DOWNLOAD GNUTELLA --

DUE TO A COMPLETE ONSLAUGHT OF USAGE FROM GETTING SLASHDOTTED, THE BETA GROUP IS NOW CLOSED. I will be creating a mailing list where we will take 1,000 members for a closed beta group to test the network stability of gnutella before the 1.0 release.

Details are forthcoming. The kids are usually hanging out in #gnutella on EfNet IRC if you want to come visit.

Wow.

Plankeye

Re:Napster.com days numbered?

Once the Gnutella protocol is published, it should be possible to build a bridge to the Napster namespace - this would facilitate the expansion of both dataspaces really quickly!

piracy and bandwidth

I can't wait to have 58% of my university's bandwidth used up by piracy, AGAIN.

You contradict yourself. If free music becomes as popular as pirated music is now, then you will experience the same bandwidth problems, except this time it will all be legal.

I remember when I did not autoload images because of bandwidth problems on the internet. Well now the internet has grown up a little and graphics are a small load on the network.

Sooner or later, music will be chump change compared to movie streaming or whatever comes next. We should hope that the consequence of the extreme bandwidth usage is more bandwidth, rather than the despise of new technology.

Napster Redux

Napster was an interesting proof of concept, in that it allowed for a large peer-to-peer MP3 fileshare.

Regardless of the outcome of the RIAA lawsuit against Napster, developments such as Gnullsoft's illustrate the "Whack-a-Mole" problem the government and industry face.

Call it gestalt critical mass. Viral software memes. Slashdot backlash. Whatever.

Simply stated, you can't keep a good idea down.

distributed file sharing

After first hearing of Napster I was quite impressed with the idea but a little confused as to why its mp3 only. If the gnullsoft version allows other types of files we are going to need some kind of quality control system in order for it to be useable. You could have groups that catalog certain archives.. provide crc's and such. so that you can look up what files you are looking for in a database and search other users machines for them.. and not have to worry about getting poor quality data.

Re:from the gnutella features list (funny)

There you go. Block the primary host and you shut the whole thing out: It's what Northwestern University did: they blocked *.napster.com from resolving, meaning that you couldn't connect to get the 'optimal server'. The downloads would've gone through if they were to ever begin, because they're not blocking ports, just name resolution. The same thing, methinks, could be done with this program too.

Actually good sir, I believe you're mistaken. Gnutella appears to use a peer-to-peer-to-peer network to form its lists. That means all you have to do is link to a friend outside of the university firewall on whatever port you would decide, and all of a sudden you have access to all the hosts that he has, and all the hosts that the people he is linked to has, etc. This expands exponetially, and the only thing colleges could do is block EVERY port except vital ones. (HTTP, FTP, GOPHER, etc.) Heh, I'd like to see them try to pull that off.. They'd have a geek riot on their hands. ;-)

Chocolaty love?

This is on their feature list, and obviously, it's the critical feature :-) The others are just marketing candy:

Sexy product name makes you hungry with cravings for chocolaty love

This is great! (but)

It's great to see a big, AOL subsidiary, that as far as I know has never shown a big interest in producing GPLed software now jumping in and producing something like this.

But! The concern I have is that the analysis I've seen of the Napster protocol shows that it's a very poorly designed protocol. I wonder if there's any chance gnutella will be able to either support different protocols -- the old Napster protocol and a new better designed one, or help redesign the current protocol.

Anybody know a good alternative protocol that could be used instead? Anybody care to design one? Does someone want to let these guys know this is a priority?

Is this the end of Hotline?

Personally, I'd rather support a free, open-sourced cross-platform protocol than one from the company that (depending on how you look at it) screwed a young Adam Hinkley out of his own program.

Background info is available from this Salon article [salon.com] (the second of two parts; the first part gives an overview of Hotline). For the latest news in the case, try here [fairfax.com.au] or here [fairfax.com.au].

Hotline is what got me much of my MP3 collection, but the company's actions caused me to think twice. Napster doesn't present such a moral quandry.

Re:from the gnutella features list (funny)

Oh, that's just f***ing wonderful. I can't wait to have 58% of my university's bandwidth used up by piracy, AGAIN. I just can't wait to be sitting here, wishing I had a modem connection to AOL rather than having the dedicated ethernet connection I have now.

Look, I listen to mp3's, I own a Rio, I think the RIAA is evil, etc. etc., but I want Napster and everything like it gone!

Don't tell me about the legal uses for napster. That's BS. If you own a CD, you can make your own mp3's from it, and if you want legally free music, you can go to the band's web site and download the music from them. Or, go to mp3.com, or traxinspace.com, or one of the many other free music sites. That's what I do, and all the music I listen to is legally free. And it is damn good, too.

Furthermore, I really think we should be encouraging the artists who have been so generous as to give us free music. The should be compared to the coders that have givin us free (open source) software. If people realize that there is a lot of really good music on mp3.com, and start downloading it, then there will only be more in the future. As it is, the incredible amount of pirating going on right now only encourages the RIAA and the government to make more laws to prevent it--laws which we hate. The DMCA, for example. If there wasn't so much damn pirating going on, mabey we would not have it.

If everyone starts downloading legally free music, the RIAA won't be able to anything about it but say "oh shit", and fade away. The artists will all head towards giving away their music for free. (they can make money in so many other ways--endorsements, concerts, etc.) So, then all our music will be free, just the way we like it. There is no need for Napster clones.

------
-Everything has a cause
-Nothing can cause itself
-You cannot have an infinite string of causes

I'm not overly impressed...

... with the author's desire to completely circumvent the administrator's control over their own network. There are technolgies in this software to specifically prevent it from being throttled.

Yes I'm all for free speech and the freedom of information but at what cost? I can see the entire QoS of dorms and "open" labs to be turned way way way down over this. It would have been much better to have some kind of control app which the network admins could say "300kbps tops during peak times" or something to that effect.

Mind you I can now also see work being put into firewall software which monitors for large bandwidth useage on an connection basis and, if it exceeds xkbps for y seconds, throttle that IP down or turn them off completely.

Maybe this isn't such a bad thing after all.

from the gnutella features list (funny)

• Distributed nature of servant makes it pretty damned tough for college administrators to block access to the gnutella service
• Ability to change the port you listen on makes it even harder for those college administrators to block access
• Ability to define your own internal network with a single exit point to the rest of the internet makes it almost fucking impossible for college sysadmins to block the free uninhibited transfer of information
• Am I making myself painfully clear? I thought so.

college sysadmins

The issue is not the free flow of information.

The issue is economies of limited data transfer bandwidth in a shared network environment.

Where I go to school, we have full ATM switched core (or at least thats my understanding). Theres an OC3c to the net, along with a vbns connect (with another oc-12 to vbns coming soon).

Thing was... napster traffic was using 30% of the bandwidth available. To support this new traffic would have cost millions more on the OC3c connect to the internet. Probally eating out of state and federal funds, alongside higher tuition costs. Just so some bastard can get his/her britney spears music and porn.

Why should I fund their abusive network saturating connectivity? Why do you turn sysadmins into the enemy when the real enemy is the economics of scarce bandwidth?

In any case. There will allways be a method to block these products from saturating internet and vbns lines. Why tell people otherwise? If anything, you make it even more of a priority to start blocking SYN traffic unless someone has specifically asked to run services on their machines.

"Am I making myself painfully clear? I thought so."

ADOM....

ADOM was originally released with the caveat that version 1.0 would have source. We're now (after several years) at 0.99gamma16

Needless to say, the author of that software package felt that he had written himself a loophole, and could take advantage of the good will of the open source community. I don't know about these people, but if the mindset isn't release early, release often, then they don't get it to begin with.

Re:Napster.com days numbered?

I wouldn't count Napster's days being numbered anytime soon. The biggest hurdle if some other program were to overtake it, is to get the masses using it. More so then any program since ICQ do I have non computer friends using Napster, who have never heard of Linux, or open source. If Napster continues to work the masses will not move over. The windows client market is still the one that has to be broken into before something will explode to levels Napster has.

OpenNap already does this

the OpenNap server already has these features and its been available for quite some time now, there is even the flexibility to do porn searching just like the software in this story and iMesh (avi's, mpegs, au, etc). Opennap can be found Here [sourceforge.net]. here is a list of the available napster clones excluding the one in the story.

gnap [sourceforge.net] -- gnome napster client

gnome-napster [sourceforge.net] -- gnome napster client

jnap [perham.net] -- java napster client

jnapster [sourceforge.net] -- java napster client

java napster [tux.org] -- java napster client

crapster [sourceforge.net] -- BeOS napster client

gnapster [gotlinux.org] -- gnome napster client

BitchX [bitchx.com] -- IRC chat client with napster plugin

Knapster [netpedia.net] -- KDE napster client

BeNapster [sourceforge.net] -- BeOS napster client

Napster for BeOS [sourceforge.net]

Napster for MacOSX [sourceforge.net]

gtk napster [geocities.com] -- gtk napster client

amster [amigart.com] -- amiga napster client

iNapster [optusnet.com.au] -- WWW interface to napster

BWap [bitchx.com] -- standalone console unix client based on bx-nap plugin for BitchX

These are all open source and free, and will work with Opennap servers (although most right now probably aren't coded to take advantage of the Pr0n search extensions, yet. Give it some time though.

zoinks.

hoowah. alright, it's been awhile since i've woken up to find the webservers on fire from a slashdotting. as a result, i've had to close the beta group. there were over 10,000 downloads this morning so far, and we're just not ready to have you all connect to the group pool yet. sorry. i wanted to respond to a few concerns i've seen here with some answers to things that are being misrepresented. first off, gnutella is not a napster clone. there are several major differences, the most important difference that the search hierarchy is not centralized, but instead shared across the network of hosts you end up connecting to. additionally, gnutella does not use the napster network protocol, which seems to be brought up a few times here. lots of folks have mentioned the fact that they're having problems getting on this morning. I've shut down the redirector as well so you can't join the network at the moment, since the beta is closed. You're more than welcome, should you find the app, to join your own private sharing groups (which is, indeed, more the design of the product than this morning's 5,000 host marathon) we want to promote group sharing *within* campuses as well as global sharing. The hope is that local bandwidth will be used and encouraged instead of piping down brittney porn through your poor dorm's overcramped asante 10BT hubs and crisco 2501s. more to come later. thanks for the interest so far!