This writeup is an editorial/discussion on this author's perceived oncoming death of Gnutella
Besides the
fundamental flaws in the
scalability and the
observation that it tends to
kill connections, Gnutella has a tiny
community problem. It was recently observed that 50% of Gnutella was served up by 5% of the users. Primarily no one shares files on these sorts of
network, but are willing to quietly
steal from them.
This is the downfall of any "file sharing"
community: there are many people taking, but not a lot
giving. Those few people who are sticking their neck out supplying the repositories of information (whether they be
pirates or
freedom advocates) are not getting any incentive to keep
going. This will kill a
community. Gnapster is in a way kind of dying. There are
splinters on the network (making it perform better, but not helping the user), and fewer and fewer people are using it and
contributing to it. It will eventually fall into a kind of
obscurity, I beleive. Justin Frankel, it's author has stopped working on the project, and thus can not improve any of its fundamentals. Many
Open Source and
port projects are underway to reverse engineer and make the sharing
application better, however that progesses at only a
limited rate of speed. How much longer can such a network hold up before people leave?
It's a shame. Gnutella had a great chance of becoming something really big and
innovative, and in a way it did, but now, I think it will be just another part of the
internet fallen into ruin.
Distributed networks have their place in
theory, but are they ready for
practice? Perhaps that will be the new model of the
internet one day: people sharing information via their own repository, rather than the server /client topology that we stand by today. Perhaps it is time for the
great minds to rethink this problem, and get back to us.