Gnutella is a completely decentralized network: every user has an equivalent software, there´s no central server, which makes it unpossible - e.g. Such Gnutella clients include LimeWire, BearShare, Morpheus, Gnucleus and more. Later, a group of independent programmers decoded the protocol and published their findings - which led to the development of new programms for the Gnutella network. Despite the take-down, Gnutella took off, as other websites provided the software and became one of the most popular file-sharing networks. Gnutella was taken down, Frankel left AOL shortly. AOL was at that time merging with Time Warner, a company that had filed a lawsuit against Gnutella´s predecessor Napster. 'The peer-to-peer software was offered for free download on Nullsofts corporate servers without AOLs knowledge. When the client searches for files, it sends the request to each node it is connected to, which then forwards the request to the other nodes it is connected, until a number of 'hops' occurs from the sender.' After the connection, the client requests a list of working addresses and proceeds to connect to other nodes until it reaches a quota. At start up, Gnutella will try to find at least one node to connect to. Anybody who implements the Gnutella protocol is able to search and locate files on that network. Using the same search protocol, such as Gnutella, forms a compatible network for different applications. Gnutella is a pure P2P network, without any centralized servers. It's an open, decentralized search protocol for finding files through the peers. 'used in many applications to allow connecting to the same network and searching files in a centralized manner.

Gnutella 2 status