“For a product that doesn’t exist, Gnutella 0.56 works
remarkably well. It may lack some of the amenities of actual
real-world products, endowed with publishers and marketing
departments, but like many of these spontaneous freeware projects,
it gives away nothing in the areas of functionality or
reliability.”
“Gnutella is similar to Napster. Both allow you to share a
specific area of your hard drive with other users, thereby
permitting a free exchange of files. But unlike Napster, Gnutella
specifically supports non-MP3 files. In fact, you can use it with
any type of file at all.“
“Also unlike Napster, Gnutella owes nothing to any company or
central server. Instead, users simply link to each other
peer-to-peer, just like network users usually do. To connect to
Gnutella, you need to enter the address of any other computer
that’s using Gnutella. After that, they can all “see” each
other.”