Evan Kleiman
- 2002.03.04
Q. What is Gnutella?
A. Gnutella is a file
sharing systems that is somewhat similar to Napster. It can be used
to share music, but Gnutella takes things a few steps further than
Napster.
The Power To Share More Than Just Music Alone
First, Gnutella allows you to share files of any type,
not just music in the MP3 format. If you'd like to, you could share
your entire hard drive (not that you'd really want to) with the
entire world.
Since Gnutella has this advantage over Napster and the Napster
clones, it raises many more concerns for debate of both a moral and
legal nature. Sharing music is one thing for the record companies
to debate, but using any common Gnutella network-accessing program
(such as LimeWire, etc. - we'll get into that later), just typing
in the word "Microsoft" will yield the reason this software is
under such hard scrutiny and debate. You will see full versions of
Office, Windows, and even Bob (remember that) available for you
just to download onto your computer. You, of course, decided how to
use Gnutella, whether for good or for piracy.
Gnutella isn't all bad; in fact, it is much more than just a
nifty little piracy aid with a cool name. The ideas behind Gnutella
are revolutionary, as we can see in the next example of just why it
is as good as they all say.
"Designed To Survive Nuclear War"
One of the main downsides of Napster - and the main reason it
was so easy to be shut down - was that everything was linked on a
centralized server. You, as a home user, would tap into these
severs using Napster's own software and do your downloading as you
wished.
Gnutella changes that whole idea. The Internet is based on
almost everything coming from centralized servers for everything
that you do, but Gnutella's principle is different. Instead of
having just one or two servers for everyone to connect to, everyone
in effect provides their own server. You could think of it as one
big network "collective." (Yes, people, you heard it here first: a
Borg reference referring to something other than Microsoft.)
Why is this so great? If one computer goes down, you can just
download the file you need from another server. Gnutella is a
network that is not dependent on any one computer, so if one or
even one-thousand computers go down, yours will still work, and you
will be on your merry downloading way.
Now that you know what Gnutella is, how can you use it?
Gnutella software is very abundant out there around the net for
you to download, however, right now there are two main contenders
for Gnutella servers on the Macintosh platform.
LimeWire
LimeWire is by far my
favorite Gnutella client. Since it is Java-based, you will need all
of the applications associated with Java (which is all included in
the eleven megabyte installer). Being Java-based makes the program
a little sluggish and unresponsive at times, but it is very much
crash-free. In fact, I've never had any of the final versions crash
on me.
Of course, other than download speed, stability is one of my
determining factors in choosing a Gnutella client - what good is a
cool looking program that dies out at 84% in a 9 megabyte
download?
LimeWire sports such features as resumable downloads and a nice
feature referred to as "swarm downloading," which allows you to
download files from multiple servers at one time, which not only
speeds up downloads significantly, but also allows you to pick up
an interrupted download almost seamlessly. When a server drops a
download, it will automatically go to the next one hosting that
exact file.
LimeWire is free. However, there is also a "LimeWire Plus"
version which is available for US$8.50. All it basically does is
remove the not really annoying ad bar on the bottom.
Mactella
Another viable contender, Mactella, has many of the features
offered in its competitors, but in a much slimmer package and with
a smaller footprint. However, I find it a lot less tolerant to bad
Internet links and much less stable than the LimeWire, so I tend to
use LW a lot more often (I have very little tolerance for dropped
downloads).
But, if you're just in the market for tight little Gnutella
client purely for MP3 downloading, Mactella is your best bet.
Phex
Phex is a program
based on the older Java-based Gnutella client, Furi, just like
Mactella. Phex has many of the features of LimeWire. In an attempt
to make one downloadable version of Phex compatible with every OS
under the sun, it is written in the Java programming language, thus
it has no OS-Specific code at all.
While this is a good feature in theory for the power user, the
novice user will find it as a rather huge annoyance. Instead of
seeing an executable when you first decompress the .SIT archive and
view its contents, you are greeted by some not-so-friendly Java
Classes, which you are responsible for opening using Java SDK
(Software Developers Kit) Version 1.3 or later, which can be an
inconvenience for many.
While this column answers your basic questions about how
Gnutella works, Gnutella is also going to be a large source of fuel
for the ongoing debate over the legality of sharing files on the
Internet.
