How Gnutella Works
Gnutella was a prototype client developed in March 2000 by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper (who also created WinAmp). At the time, America Online (AOL) had just purchased Frankel and Pepper's Nullsoft. AOL were not willing to take the chance that what happened with Napster would happen with Gnutella, so they yanked the prototype from the server hours after its release.
Clearly, the story did not end there.
Open-source developer, Bryan Mayland, reverse-engineered the protocol, and posted it on the Web. From there, an Open Source Gnutella project began to further develop the protocol.
Now the term Gnutella has several meanings: the protocol, the open source technology, and the Internet network, Gnutella Net - or gNET. Gnutella is primarily an exchange and file-sharing network that can support arbitrary file types.
| Did you know? The name Gnutella came from a combination of GNU, a leading organization at the time in the open-source software movement, and Nutella, a creamy Italian chocolate spread [1]. |
Gnutella does not run as a single, standard client software. Instead, it runs as a series of diverse clients that all support the general Gnutella protocol. See Gnutella Clients for more on this.
The main difference between Gnutella and Napster was that Gnutella was designed as a true P2P network - there is no central server in the Gnutella protocol. For more on this, see Gnutella Architecture.
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