Why competing Gnutella clients help LimeWire

Hi, 

This is a short text explaining, why competing Gnutella clients help LimeWire, 
and why it is in the best interest of LimeWire to foster the GDF as 
development platform. 

In the Gnutella network, we have a friendly climate (please excuse the 
germanism) of working hand in hand and sharing ideas. 

Also the improvements in other Gnutella clients benefit LimeWire directly and 
indirectly: 
Directly they improve network health and increase the user base of Gnutella in 
general. 
Indirectly they create a pressure on LimeWire to improve further, which might 
be inconvenient in the short term, but will result in LimeWire becoming a 
better software on the long run. 


This constant evolution of the Gnutella protocol is what made it survive from 
the beginning, and it is vital the ongoing success of LimeWire, because 
competition in Gnutella means that someone says "hey I've got a great idea 
and I want everyone to profit from it" and then realizes that idea, which 
strengthens Gnutela as a whole. 

The competition from other networks means instead, that improvements are done 
mostly invisibly for anyone else and that Gnutella might fall behind the 
curve. 

So you need the friendly competition in Gnutella to stay fit for the harder 
competition between different p2p-networks. 

And you may even need the competition between different networks to stay fit 
for the even harder competition between different ways of searching, 
organizing and distributing information and data. 
And the competition in Gnutella can help you stay at the head of the 
network-crowd. 


So I want to ask you, not only in the interest of the community, but also in 
your own self-interest as LimeWire developers, to remember that your survival 
is directly bound to the GDF in the long run, and that it is in your own 
interest to cooperate with other Gnutella clients an ddevelopers. 
Other Gnutella clients are not your enemies but your friends with whom you can 
spar to be fit for the real battle. 

And they can fight alongside you in the battles to come. 


Also other Gnutella clients catch those users, who aren't happy with your 
decisions for the user interface (those people will aways exist), so those 
still stay in Gnutella and also contribute to LimeWires success that way, and 
so you can concentrate on making a clean interface which greatly pleases many 
but displeases some, instead of creating an interface which displeases 
everyone a little. 


So please open up you discussions and make your decisions and work more 
tranparent to other developers on the neutral ground of the GDF. It will 
benefit you in the long run (and might be crucial to your survival). 


Besides: This is true for any Gnutella client. I chose LimeWire as example, 
because they are in a position in which they could easily forget this simple 
relation between Gnutella clients right now. 

Best wishes, 
Arne Babenhauserheide
- http://draketo.de
PS: I help with the development of Phex, but I am interested in the health of 
the whole Gnutella network. It's the environment in which my contributions 
live, after all. 


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