70% of gnutella users dont share.

Say everyone on gnutella shared 50 files - the result would be AMAZING speeds downloading and more search results than one could dream of; however, as long as clients like bearshare make it the easiest thing in the world to freeload, this will never happen..

Tis a sad reality..

Yeah,
Thats just human.
Its a human instinct to be selfish and greedy.
Only the strongest survive, remember Darwin?

Thats a reason why Communism failed and
why Gnutella WILL fail sooner or later :(

Gamer, where did you get those numbers from? I hope you don't rely on that almost 2 year-old paper "Freeride on Gnutella" (or whatever it's called). It's one of the few papers on that topic I've ever found and the numbers aren't true anymore.

You can easily modify an open source client to collect up-to-date data from PONGs.

I did that and no matter what configuration I used (connecting to limewire hosts, morpheus hosts or any other clients), never, more than 25% of the PONGs came from hosts not sharing any files. QueryReplies indicated that less than 15% of all clients sharing files, never had a successful upload. That means at least 64% of all clients are actively sharing files. My (more optimistic) guess is that it's more like 70% to 75%.

Well, let's see...

There'sd a big diiference between 'I'm sharing' and 'I'm letting other people download from me. There are a lot of users that with the ecuse of 'I have a firewall' don't let anybody download from them. And it's not impossible to do so.

Ivan
"In the dark we make a brighter light"

It's not a big problem to download from firewalled hosts, at least for people without a firewall, who are connected to the internet directly.

Most people who are sharing are also letting other people download from them.

That's what I said. You CAN download from frewalled users. I'm one of them ;)

Ivan
"In the dark we make a brighter light"

no