Great article. It's been almost 20 years since I've used Gnutella, but I seem to recall that, as flexible and resilient as it was, it had some pretty major issues with speed of queries and scaling to millions of users. I think Bittorrent become popular in the mid-to-late '00s in large part because its model of redundant copies scaled better than Gnutella.

> The Gnutella project began as an internal demo that leaked to the public after its corporate overlord, AOL, cancelled the project.

I don't think it was actually a leak in the usual sense of the word. There was no unauthorized release; rather, AOL didn't really understand what their new subsidiary was releasing.

As I understand it, Gnutella was written as a new project by Justin Frankel, the author of Winamp (which probably did more to popularize using computers to listen to music than anything else!), during or shortly after the sale of Winamp and Nullsoft to AOL. It was probably a chaotic time, and a massive culture clash between this big behemoth of a late-'90s tech and communications company, and this small startup of Early Internet Nerds.

Nullsoft's new corporate overlords probably didn't understand what they were creating: a new file-sharing/music-piracy program that would be like Napster, but more decentralized and resilient.

Frankel/Nullsoft released Gnutella and it was downloaded by thousands of people immediately. Perhaps friends in the recording industry called AOL execs, or in some other way they finally understood what it was, and AOL shut down the downloads less than a day later and cancelled the planned open-source code release, but due to its decentralization the network kept running, and it was soon reverse engineered.

As far as I know, the source code of the original Windows implementation of Gnutella never leaked.