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).

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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!