Hey what's the deal? I see a lot of flames over LimeWire for including adware and/or spyware.

Let me point out the following:

- the founders of LimeWire invested considerable funds to develop their product and the necessary infrastructure

- LimeWire is *free software* (free in terms of price)

- Attorneys do not work for free. At least, not the good ones.

- P2P companies are under legal pressures

- Bandwith is not free, nor is it cheap. Especially for internationally distributed software which appears in CNET's top 10.

- The LimeWire team had the decency to open-source the product before the inclusion of advertising components.

- Unlike other popular P2P software, LimeWire's development team makes themselves accessible to users via forums, and listens to feedback.

- The LimeWire team has contributed the most to the open protocol efforts, and is the fair impartial custodian of The GDF (Gnutella developers forum).

- Clip2 went bankrupt from lack of revenue, and we lost a valuable and powerful host cache service. The network has mostly recovered, but not before we lost a significant percentage of users in the shuffle.

If the inclusion of bundled components bothers you to a significant degree, you can always grab the sources from the CVS tree and build your own client.

The advertising components are not included in the source tree for obvious reasons (in general, redistribution of Cydoor or other third party components is not allowed by their license agreement).

---

And to the LimeWire team (Christopher, Greg, Adam, Anurag, Mark, et al.):

- Ignore the comments from irate users.

I wasted a lot of time and effort responding and becoming emotional. The only alternative to bundling of advertising components is bankruptcy. This fact alone should assuage the guilt. In the long run, users benefit despite the debatable negative impact of advertising components.

Viva Gnutella!

I am the author of this thread

- Vinnie

P.S. forum admins, something is wrong with logging into the forum, and the Accept/OK button is missing from the login page.

It works for me. Anyone else having problems?

It happened when I was not logged in and I attemped to post. I filled in the user name and password (in the POSTTHREAD page) and pressed Submit Reply.

It said thanks for the post and when I viewed it, it was from Unregistered.

It still works for me so I'm not sure why that would be happening. We haven't made any changes to the scripts, so if there's a bug somewhere, vBulletin probably knows about it already.

Vinnie Falco is taking irony to the extreme.He is the person that left thousands of users with corrupted PC's thanks to him bundling Onflow with Bearshare.When the end user tried to uninstall certain builds of Onflow from their computer the end result was that many users had to reinstall Windows or totally reformat the hard drive.
Falco used to slag off Limewire and its developers,and dismiss their software as "crap" now he's their best buddy.
Gnutella doesn't need Bearshare or Limewire to survive,there are plenty of talented programmers out their who don't want to make a quick buck by leeching off the filesharing community.If programmers need to make money at least have the guts to inform end users exactly what is being installed on their PC's,and the risks involved,treating your users with contempt is not the way to do it,P2P does not and never will need your sort.

> Gnutella doesn't need Bearshare or Limewire to survive...

The gnutella network wouldn't have survived in it's early stages if there were neither of these clients. And BearShare and LimeWire still on majority of the gnutella network.

In anycase, one of the points that Vinnie makes is, that if you don't like the spyware bundled with BearShare or LimeWire, then don't use either.

> The gnutella network wouldn't have survived in it's early
> stages if there were neither of these clients.

And mankind wouldn't have surrived without babarians and war.

Cumon, both isn't true. Gnutella is NOT Bearshare or Limewire, but some of Bearshare noble fellows want to make us believe! True is Amadeus post, especially Vinnie Falco used to slag off _every_ other Gnutella client. Aggressive behaviour of some developers and trying to fool users with "Addins" which are Spyware is a pain inside the Gnutella community.

Use your freedom, choose another client!

[quote]Originally posted by Unregistered
> Gnutella doesn't need Bearshare or Limewire to survive...

The gnutella network wouldn't have survived in it's early stages if there were neither of these clients. And BearShare and LimeWire still on majority of the gnutella network. [/QUOTE

Speaking from a Windows user point of view,I'm sure the developers of Gnuleus & Gnotella would disagree with you there,however without BearShare and LimeWire's (buisness/money-making/leeching) involvement with Gnutella I am sure that Gnutella would have moved on from the stalemate that it still finds itself in.

Gnutella lovers/Bearshare users also note that Vinnie Falco's future versions of Bearshare may or may not contain 'enforced' parasite software on your PC'S ,but judging from his approval of Limewires underhand tactics(not being upfront with the end user about what is really installed on THEIR PC)then I

I was using gnut and other clients (I don't remember their names, - it was some dead projects for gtk but it was not gtk-gnutella) before I even noticed their was any such thing as Limewire or Bearshare. So there probably would be a gnutella without Bearshare or Limewire although I doubt the network would have grown that fast.

As for ads - people, probably using ICQ, GoZilla or surfing web sites with banners shouldn't even start to complain about ads bundled with LimeWire (at least the information gathered by spyware is not shared with governmental agencies, is it?).

> without Bearshare or Limewire although I doubt
> the network would have grown that fast

Dude, you are ignoring reality. Limewire is used by only a few percentage of users, Bearshare has been used by a high amount of users in the past, but now isn't state of the art (corrupted resume, slow downloads). As a matter of fact a lot of developers argue and fight against each other (Bearshare and Limewire in the past, Falco against all), but do not further develop Gnutella... all this is slowing down and throwing back gnutella development for months!
I'm glad that a software like Xolox and Gnotella came up and showed what Gnutella could be and made an end of pro/contra MP3 metadata shown in Gnutella. The first thing Vinnie does was attacking any yelling to everyone that is not Bearshare, also the nobel closed grouped "the_GDF" did not see or learn a lesson from Xolox, Gnotella or Fastrack advantages. I appreciate Limewire's reseatch, but I have never seen the Limewire developer discussing with other interested users.

Gnutella is an open protocol, most gnutella developers are closed minded.

That is one cool statement.Respect