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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