LimeWire Review

Name: LimeWire
Homepage: www.LimeWire.com
Cost: Free
Recommended: Yes

March 15th 2000, Nullsoft releases a program called Gnutella, it was the first program to have a decentralized network. Thanks to the news site Slashdot, millions of people downloaded it that very same day. AOL, the parent company of Nullsoft, feared the legal implications of this program and shut it down immediately. By March 16th, Gnutella was dead and Nullsoft was forbidden to ever work on another decentralized P2P app ever again.

But it was too little too late. Some of the people that downloaded Gnutella began to reverse engineer the program. Clones of the program began to pop up. One of these clones would, in time lead the Gnutella network. This client was named LimeWire. The LimeWire developers had a safe home on SourceForge and some powerful allies. They worked with BearShare and other Gnutella developers to form Gnutella.com and build up the Gnutella network.

At version 4.0, LimeWire integrated iTunes. Also at 4.0, Gordon Mohr's MAGNETS were added. These MAGNET links allow downloads to be started by inserting the hash directly into the program, no searching required. At 4.2 LimeWire introduced Firewall to Firewall transfers by using UDP technology. This helped connections for users behind a software or router firewall.

In September 2005, LimeWire released version 4.9.30. This marked the start of filtering out copyrighted material. LimeWire would generate a pop-up for mp3 files you tried downloading that it couldn’t find a license for. These pop-ups were harmless; all they did was keep LimeWire slightly safer from the law. However, LimeWire is still working on methods to filter out copyrighted material. These efforts have spawned a new file sharing program, FrostWire. FrostWire is LimeWire, minus the filtering system. It is developed by some of the LimeWire staff, however, to quote FrostWire’s website “FrostWire is in no way affiliated with LimeWire LLC”.

LimeWire is currently one of the best file sharing programs ever. LimeWire comes in 2 versions, LimeWire and LimeWire Pro. LimeWire Pro has better searching ability which leads to better downloads. The LimeWire firewall to firewall ability makes it very adaptable. If you’re behind a weird router firewall, on a college LAN or in some other strange place, LimeWire will always work hard to build some kind of connection. Its GUI isn’t the easiest one in the world but it is skinnable.

LimeWire is written in Java; therefore it’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The downside to this is that it takes above average system resources on all OS’s. Being a Gnutella only client, LimeWire connects to about 2 million other people. This gives LimeWire users the same size library as FastTrack and 2/3rds of the library ED2K has.

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