NewsForge: LimeWire: Open-Sourcing helps set a Gnutella standard

"LimeWire , the company, was already giving away LimeWire, the application, so the free-as-in-beer debate was a non-starter. All that was left for Gorton to do is make LimeWire free as in speech, and in the competitive, yet immature, Gnutella landscape Open-Sourcing could make LimeWire the reference for file sharing over the loosely organized Gnutella network. By extension, a LimeWire standard could give Gorton's company a competitive advantage in the Gnutella peer-to-peer protocol that he believes has unlimited potential.

'I saw that there's a real need to have a very good common core for the whole network, just kind of code that behaves well,' Gorton says. 'It's unhealthy for the network if too many of these bad programs are around.'

...'I would very much like to be the guy who could own a significant chunk of the world's networks,' he says. 'I think that's what Microsoft is trying to do right now. But I'm also enough of a realist to know that Microsoft doesn't have much of a chance in pulling off that strategy, and I know I don't have a chance in hell.'"

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