Welcome to my overly enthusiastic love letter to Gnutella.
Despite its meteoric rise and its role as a driving force behind the file-sharing phenomenon of the 2000s, Gnutella has gone mostly forgotten. Some of that is because it was a component technology hidden beneath more visible projects like LimeWire.
You typed something into a search box, like “LinkinPark.mp3.exe”.
Lol
Gnutella is still active and easy to use.
This was a really cool read. It’s just missing one detail: is the protocol named after the delicious hazelnut spread… and if so, why?
From Wikipedia:
The name is a portmanteau of GNU and Nutella, the brand name of an Italian hazelnut flavored spread: supposedly, Frankel and Pepper ate a lot of Nutella working on the original project, and intended to license their finished program under the GNU General Public License. Gnutella is not associated with the GNU project[15] or GNU’s own peer-to-peer network, GNUnet.
Thanks! It’s very hard to find the protocol info.
