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Old July 12th, 2002
Patchmaster Patchmaster is offline
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Join Date: March 5th, 2002
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Having used several Gnutella clients, gone over to Morpheus/Kazaa, and then come back to Gnutella when Kazaa shut out Morpheus, I've seen enough of both networks that I might be able to provide a few clues.

While Music City talked a good game about all the great new things that were coming to their client, there was absolutely no indication they even had a programmer on staff. All the code came from Kazaa (or whatever its parent company was called). Music City produced nothing on their own. They even stopped participating in their own support forum, the only real support coming from other users and one Kazaa programmer who stopped in once or twice a week.

The point being that when Kazaa pulled the rug out, Morpheus was totally unprepared and most likely had no one readily available to get things going again. That they were able to field an even slightly modified version of Gnucleus in the time they did is a minor miracle. So I really wouldn't expect a whole lot out of Morpheus as far as client updates go. I heard a talk given by the head guy at Music City and it was clear he cared about the users only as a means to put money in his pocket. He is one who will spend not one penny more than absolutely necessary to keep the peasants from storming the castle gates. That's a great attitude if you own stock in his company; not so great if you're using his software.

Also, Morpheus/Kazaa users were not particularly well known for being generous with their files. As I'm sure has occurred in the Gnutella world, there were long, frequently strident discussions in the Morpheus forums about how best to kill the leeches, and whether they should be tortured before being disposed of. The Morpheus/Kazaa network was largely sustained by a small percentage of users who shared massive numbers of files. The remainder of the users were split pretty evenly between those who shared nothing and those who shared a small number of files, probably what they'd downloaded in the last week or so. The observation that connecting to Morpheus ultrapeers results in fewer search results may well be less about problems with the Morpheus client than it is with the Morpheus users. The client can only report on what the users are sharing. If the vast majority of them are sharing just a few files, that could well explain the sparse search returns.