Open Source Development

Lime Wire supports Gnutella's open-protocol, prejudice-free development environment. Since nobody owns the Gnutella protocol, any company or person can use it to send or respond to queries, and no entity will have an artificial choke hold over the network or over the information flowing through it. This free market enviroment promotes competition among entities choosing to respond to the same queries. The model for Gnutella's growth and development is the World Wide Web. On the World Wide Web, nobody owned the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) on which the Web was based, nor did anybody own the web itself, which has allowed its growth to be so explosive, and the spectrum of its applications so broad.

All computers running a program utilizing the Gnutella protocol are said to be on the Gnutella Network (gNet). On the World Wide Web, each computer is connected to only one other computer at a time. When a user visits Amazon.com, she is not at Yahoo.com. The two sites are mutually exclusive. On the Gnutella Network, a user is connected to several other computers at once. Information can be received from many sources simultaneously.

What is Gnutella?

Gnutella is not a web site. It doesn't contain web sites. The content that is available on the Gnutella Network does not come from web sites or from the publishers of Gnutella-compatible software; it comes from other users running Gnutella-compatible software on their own computers. Gnutella is a networking protocol, which defines a manner in which computers can speak directly to one another in a completely decentralized fashion. Software publishers such as Lime Wire LLC have written and distributed programs which are compatible with the Gnutella protocol, and which therefore allow users to participate in the Gnutella Network.

Read "Understanding Peer-to-Peer Networking and File-Sharing"

We ask that you support our efforts towards achieving these future goals. To help cover costs, we are offering LimeWire PRO to those who would like to contribute towards improving and promoting this open forum for communication and expression. You can also contribute to the open source code. Limewire is written in Java, and will run on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Sun, and other computing platforms. To read more about the open source effort, visit our Open Source section.