Beware, fellow posters: The mods are CENSORING the posts made to this board! Why are they doing it? Because they are well aware that this latest release of Limewire is piggybacking on the catch-all excuse of dwindling VC funds. Opportunistic GREED, if you ask me. Spyware is spyware, and if Limewire wants to make some $$ by adding it, that's fine. I'll just migrate to other, better clients such as Morpheus, which is refreshingly free of spyware!

I'm not censoring posts.

Their funds are dwindling. What do you expect them to do then?

Hi Cyclocide!

I expect Gnet clients without spyware, especially cydoors...

but I suppose Gnutella will die...

all affords for nothing...

Morgwen

That's not what I meant. I meant what do you expect them to do to generate revenue?

Hmmm, It's funny but you know in the olden days companies usually had to figure this out *before* people would hand them money. The flaw was thinking VC was ever a substitute for actual revenue. Despite my respect for the Lime developers, substituting one failed revenue model for another doesn't seem like a plan for success either.

What I think will *really* be interesting is what happens once they figure out that user-hostile features and open source go together about as well as Hitler at a rabbi convention. Expect to see forked version with the adware removed shortly after every new release. Likewise, from what I understand the ads are also only on the Win32 version too. Java being what it is, I wonder how hard it would be to get one of the non-windows distributions to work.

Cydoor has a long spyware history. Anyone using it should provide good evidence to the contrary if they expect anyone to believe them (like an independent review of all Cydoor code). Of course, I won't hold my breath for Cydoor allowing that! It's interesting to see how much more lax a developer's definition of "spyware" becomes once they start using the stuff. ;-)

Ok, thread is over, you lost.

I don't think there is going to be a forked version, cause people who are knowing enough to create a forked version would probably rather install a non-windows distribution. - Using Linux for example, it would be enough, just to overwrite the .jar files with .jar files from another installer. (Although various helper applications to preview something won't work.)

What really amazes me is that you guys don't even realize that the code at limewire.org has all banner ads turned off. There is absolutely no need to tweek the code or anything to "take out" banner ads. Has nobody checked this?

Go to LimeWire.org and do a cvs checkout of limewire. You get the code and nothing else. A quick compile and you are good to go.

-greg

Well, that may be true but not many users keep a java compiler and CVS software on hand.

Still, such versions are bound to get passed around, and will probably be easy to find on the gnutella net itself. ;-)

It does highlight a problem though. For the cash you'll make, you could drive off users. Less popularity then means even less ad revenue. It's sort of a self-unfulfilling prophesy. Recently LimeWire's really been gaining on BearShare - perhaps in part because of it's adware free status. It would be sad to see users turn away from it now.

I'm sympathetic with your problem - you need to make money somehow and I do hope you find a way. It's just I'd be very careful of the software bundles you include - even if optional. Some have a *very* bad reputation, and are known to cause real problems - the people behind them view users only as a resource to exploit.

Rightly or wrongly, people will judge LimeWire by the company it keeps.

I think LimeWire's bundled products are a temporary solution.

This is justified at this stage of Gnutella, until the legal issues and technical issues are resolved.

By that time, I think significant sustainable business models will have arrived and make bundled software obsolete.

Has anyone checked out the LimeWire Peer Server lately?

If advertisements and bundled products are temporarily needed to advance this technology into the maintstream, then I'm all for it.

Just out of curiosity. Let's assume gnutella is free of legal hassles, and becomes truly functional. Even then how will it make developers any money?

Say it even becomes an established RFC'd protocol like FTP or HTTP. It's not exactly easy to make money with an FTP program or web browser now is it? The protocol itself, while necessary, hardly guarantees developers any of the profit.

It's already possible to make a reliable P2P protocol if you design it from scratch (ie FastTrack). From a financial standpoint, what is the benefit of retrofitting Gnutella? The established network of file swappers isn't of much use to corporate needs. If there's one thing even the thickest-headed VC guy must know by now, it's that's being wildly popular doesn't equal wildly profitable.

As I see it "gnutella" as a thing has almost no profit potential. Maybe years down the road some form of P2P will play a part in commercial applications, but not in any form the current gnutella developers will benefit from. If the commercial clients disappear (which unfortunately is beginning to sound likely), development will continue in the open source community, among universities CS students, etc.

Indeed, most of the Internet wasn't developed with profit in mind. It works largely because of that - corporations just won't play that nicely together.