Gnutella is a file sharing network available on the internet; in 2007 Gnutella is thought to be among the top three in popularity ranking alongside eDonkey2000 and FastTrack. Gnutella was developed by two gents from Nullsoft in 2000. Once the program was made available for download it was on Nullsoft’s servers however, the next day AOL, who had just acquired Nullsoft, stopped Nullsoft from doing any work on the project. Gnutella was then reverse engineered and open source clones started to appear; this development of clients by different groups remains the M.O. of Gnutella development to this very day.

Gnutella is fully distributed, contrary to semi-centralized systems like FastTrack (Kazaa) and centralized systems like Napster. This is the reason Gnutella became so popular once Napster was threatened from legal action. Variations of Gnutella began springing up allowing improvement in scalability.

Gnutella spawned the likes of LimeWire as it grew in popularity; it also acquired the commercial likes of Morpheus. In fact the name “Gnutella” isn’t any single piece of software or any one project; rather it refers to the open protocol used by many clients. With continued development and since many parties are always developing new clients all the time, what Gnutella will come to mean is anyone’s guess.

A Gnutella download works easily enough. Once you become a client with the proper Gnutella software, you need to ‘bootstrap’ and find as least one other client like you either through a preexisting list, an updated cache of web addresses, host areas, and other methods.

When a user is looking to do a search, they would send the request to the other users in their network (usually a very small number, around 5) and then they would, in turn, send that request to the other users in their network, and so on down the line. Once a result was turned up, the user would contact the searcher; at first it was back the way it came. They later devised a strategy by where a central server would connect the two.

Once the user decided to download the file, a transfer would be negotiated. If the file was not fire walled, then the searcher could connect with it directly. However, if it was then the searcher would have to send a “push request.” Again, this was back up the line the way it was found at first. As this was deemed unreliable, the central server solved this and the push took a more direct path.

One of the benefits of this type of system was so that it was difficult to shut down. Also the content of the files being shared was determined by the users; unlike Napster where a centralized network made it easy to shut down and anyone could put anything.

In a sense there was always likely to be a Gnutella vs. Gnutella 2; programs can always be improved upon with new ideas. However many of the current servers thought of one or the other as Gnutella lite. You can download Gnutella software with any Windows based CPU; you need to do some further investigation if you’ve got a Mac.