This did not stop gnutella ; after a few days, the protocol had been reverse engineered, and compatible free and open source clones began to appear.

The word gnutella today refers not to any one project or piece of software, but to the open protocol used by the various clients.

In the classic gnutella protocol, response messages were sent back along the route the query came through, as the query itself did not contain identifying information of the node.

The outdated gnutella version 0. 4 network protocol employs five different packet types, namely

The development of the gnutella protocol is currently led by the Gnutella Developers Forum ( The GDF ).

Many protocol extensions have been and are being developed by the software vendors and free gnutella developers of the GDF.

There are efforts to finalize these protocol extensions in the gnutella 0. 6 specification at the gnutella protocol development website.

The gnutella 0. 4 standard, although still being the latest protocol specification since all extensions only exist as proposals so far, is outdated.

The Gnutella2 protocol, often referred to as G2, is, despite its name, not a successor protocol of gnutella, but rather a fork.

Other criticism included the use of the gnutella network to bootstrap G2 peers and poor documentation of the G2 protocol.

Freenet and early implementations of the gnutella protocol, on the other hand, are examples of the decentralized model.

In North America, WinMX has been eclipsed by other networks such as gnutella and eDonkey as well as by the BitTorrent file transfer protocol.

While inspired by the gnutella protocol, G2 shares little of its design with the exception of its connection handshake and download mechanics.

While some thought the goals stated for Gnutella2, primarily to make a clean break with the gnutella 0. 6 protocol and start over so that some of gnutella's less clean parts would be done more elegantly, to be impressive and desirable, other developers, primarily those of LimeWire and BearShare, thought it a " cheap publicity stunt " and discounted technical merits.

The Gnutella2 protocol still uses the old " GNUTELLA CONNECT / 0. 6 " handshake string for its connections as defined in the gnutella 0. 6 specifications, which was criticized by the GDF as an attempt to use the gnutella network for bootstrapping the new, unrelated network, while proponents of the network claimed that its intent was to remain backwards-compatible with gnutella to allow current gnutella clients to add Gnutella2 at their leisure.

An extension has been added to the gnutella protocol to allow crawlers to quickly access ultrapeers.

This parallel development of different clients by different groups remains the modus operandi of gnutella development today.

This observation identified the gnutella network as an unscalable distributed system, and inspired the development of distributed hash tables, which are much more scalable but support only exact-match, rather than keyword, search.

Ares development began in the middle of 2002 and was originally operating on the gnutella network.

Additionally gnutella adopted a number of other techniques to reduce traffic overhead and make searches more efficient.

One of the benefits of having gnutella so decentralized is to make it very difficult to shut the network down and to make it a network in which the users are the only ones who can decide which content will be available.

These are mainly concerned with searching the gnutella network.

A sore point with many gnutella developers is that the Gnutella2 name conveys an upgrade or superiority, which led to a Gnutella2 flame war.

Networks such as gnutella or Freenet use a P2P structure for nearly all tasks, with the exception of finding peers to connect to when first setting up.

Since AOL was at the time merging with Time Warner, gnutella seemed like a conflict of interest to Nullsoft's parent company, which knew that Time Warner was one of the parties taking legal action against Napster at the time.

It was spun off from the gnutella network in 2002, and is currently hosted on SourceForge. net.

Gnutella2 learned from this, and aside from having many of the added features of gnutella standard in Gnutella2, designed in future extensibility from the start.

G2 is not supported by many of the " old " gnutella network clients, however many Gnutella2 clients still also connect to gnutella.

Since version 0. 6, gnutella is a composite network made of leaf nodes and ultra nodes ( also called ultrapeers ).

Shareaza v2. 5. 5. 0, released on May 29, 2011, features further improvements to the UPnP support, as well as DC ++ and gnutella updates, enhanced anti-spam protection during searches and multi-file download merging.

From release 2. 9. 0 on, support for gnutella and G2 are no longer compiled in by default as both plugins are buggy and currently unmaintained ; however, it is still possible to compile them in by making the appropriate setting in the configuration file.

The gnutella network is a fully distributed alternative to such semi-centralized systems as FastTrack ( KaZaA ) and the original Napster.

In late 2001, the gnutella client LimeWire Basic became free and open source.

In February 2002, Morpheus, a commercial file sharing group, abandoned its FastTrack-based peer-to-peer software and released a new client based on the free and open source gnutella client Gnucleus.

On October 26, 2010, popular free-software gnutella servent LimeWire was ordered shut down by Judge Kimba Wood of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York when she signed a Consent Injunction which LimeWire and recording industry plaintiffs had agreed upon.

This event caused a notable drop in the size of the network because, while negotiating the injunction, LimeWire had staff add remote shutdown of gnutella access and file transfers as some users installed affected versions.

To envision how gnutella originally worked, imagine a large circle of users ( called nodes ), each of whom have gnutella client software.

This lowers the amount of traffic routed through the gnutella network, making it significantly more scalable.

Second, it reduces the amount of traffic routed through the gnutella network.

In practice, this method of searching on the gnutella network was often unreliable.

Also, the bandwidth cost of searching on gnutella grew exponentially to the number of connected users, often saturating connections and rendering slower nodes useless.

To address the problems of bottlenecks, gnutella developers implemented a tiered system of ultrapeers and leaves.

Gnutella For Users has a vast amount of information about these and other improvements to gnutella in user-friendly style.

Unlike Napster, where the entire network relied on the central server, gnutella cannot be shut down by shutting down any one node and it is impossible for any company to control the contents of the network, which is also due to the many free and open source gnutella clients which share the network.