Gnutella

Gnutella was a peer-to-peer client developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft. Gnutella was designed as the first true peer-to-peer filesharing network, eliminating the need for centralized servers like those which brought down Napster. Gnutella was released on March 14, 2000. Originally, the source code to the program was to be released under the GPL a few days later, but AOL, Nullsoft's parent company, yanked the program. Almost immediately, the Gnutella protocol was reverse engineered and open source clones were developed.

There are several Gnutella clients available for Linux, including:

• Limewire
• gtk-gnutella
• GiFT