What Is Gnutella?

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.