LimeWire Interview - badmouthing their own technology

Comment to the LimeWire-Interview on Slyck.

Their words, my comments (from three years of reading in and discussing on the Gnutella Development Forum (GDF):

"Gnutella has had a 2 GB file size limit, while BitTorrent excels at delivering truly enormous files."

-> That's just blabber, but it now explains, why LW wasn't that quick in closing the 2GB limit, even though the way to do it has been around for more than two years (and was posted to the Gnutella Development Forum where Gnutella developers discuss).

There is no underlying technological hurdle for sharing files with a size of more than 2GB, except for the one which LimeWire doesn't want to fix so that they can use it as an excuse to include BitTorrent.

Also Gnutella already does completely decentral swarming, and does it since more than two years ago.

The only real advantage of BitTorrent is, that it has torrent-sites where users meet and comment, but you can do the same for Gnutella (for example like http://freebase.be ).

And that the other p2p-clients don't have it.

"A Gnutella program connects to peers randomly, and broadcasts searches into its neighborhood. It can't find a file outside this neighborhood. Enter the Mojito DHT, a revolutionary new technology we've developed for LimeWire. In a distributed hash table like Mojito, the peers don't connect randomly--they organize themselves into a navigable tree. Imagine one computer has the only copy of a rare file, and another on the far side of the network wants it. With Mojito, they'll be able to find each other."

-> Except that this neighborhood is about 400,000 computers and there've been plans for years to extend it to 1 Million while reducing network traffic.

The only thing which hindered that is, that LimeWire didn't manage to get their program keep 100 connections without too much impact on performance.

And with the performance of Gnutella (traffic of only 7kB/s up and down for a fully connected ultrapeer, less then 1kB/s for a Leaf) increasing the network size wouldn't have created many problems.

-> A bit deeper: http://draketo.de/english/p2p/light/why-gnutella-scales-quite-well - if you like it, please digg it...

Still, Mojito will be a great complement to Gnutella, because it can be used to search for files and hosts _by hash_. If you want _exactly that file_, then you use mojito (aka Kademlia) and a hash string. If you want to search by keyword or tag, then you use Gnutella.

And it will help LimeWire, because other Gnutella clients won't have it at once, so they will be in front. Gnutella is an open protocol, so they need to look at all times like they are front row, else some other Gnutella client will take over their users.

I don't know, why they badmouth their own technology, but as you've seen I have some suspicions.