Vinnie's income from his spyware pals is proportional to the number of users of BearShare. The more features he adds, the more users he gets. The more features we add, the slower the network gets causing Vinnie's users to grow impatient.

Do I have that about right?

(That is, of course, meant to be tongue-in-cheek... an attention getter. I harbor no animosity towards any of the developers who are pioneers in the exciting new world of P2P.)

Gnutella doesn't work without cooperation. You cannot download what nobody is sharing. Socialism does not work in politics... no one is sufficiently altruistic and self-less. But Gnutella only exists because of altruism and sharing. I'm convinced that Gnutella will only continue to grow... in fact to EXIST... if developers can be at least as altruistic as the fruit of their labors.

The big-shots need to help the little newcomers avoid making mistakes that they (the big-shots) have already made and learned from.

The world is a better place when we have the freedom of choice bestowed by variety.

It will take cooperation between developers for Gnutella to grow. If a new feature of a client is detrimental to the network, then granted, it should be revised or removed so that it is no longer detrimental. But not all features are beneficial. How much faster would Gnutella be if there were no QoS packets? no "spyware" packets? no version info packets? no update notification packets? (isn't that the official explanation of BearShare's mystery packets?)

I don't know if I'm making much sense. Nor am I sure that I'm adding anything new to the conversation. If anyone views this as a personal attack on Vinnie and BearShare, then I apologise.