I have a very different sight of the_GDF and their role.

Basically it's one valuable source of knowledge beyond others. I take the their proposals as proposals, which means I try to understand and improve what could be done better fom my programming knowledge and point of view. If ppl don't like it, fine, but discussing should be still allowed here. Some months back (before Mike Green cleaned up the chaos), the GDF was very chaotic and sometimes discussing things dead until they didn't move anymore. We gained no improvement in network topology or for the endusers for months, other P2P systems where much more innovative and gained more users every week. Currently the GDF is more attractive, I wonder positive, great for Gnutella! But I still see LW and BS implementing things, make it a "defacto standard" and come with a "eat or die" mentalaty. I still see the GDF hiding with a lack of documentation for new coders who would like to contribute or to program a client that follows the best available Gnutella technology. With this high society behaviour, it is easy to say... oh you are bad for "the network" b/c you don't follow our rules. About votes from important developers -which developers- we have only 4-5 clients in active development. So I don't see a large active balanced developers community, compared to other open source places. The invisble pushing force is LW and BS = commercial interests (Note: For exmaple I see the name "ultrapeer" as marketing, but well some say it's because FT's supernode sounds so close... do we name hashs ultrahashs or smarthashs soon?). Finding an end, the GDF was thought for a forum of coordination between developers: but I think promotion of new concepts and new coders is behind implementation question inside the GDF. Implementation isn't everything, the GDF will not take you serious until you coded an(other) client?

I feel uncomfortable with your description of wish-they-were developers forum here. I and others spend a lot free time in writing articles and helping new Gnutella programmers + bringing new ideas and concepts to Gnutella. I don't want to turn Gnutella into FastTrack, eDonkey... but I get inspired from all, not only from the GDF.