BearShare

BearShare is a popular closed source Gnutella client software package from a company called Free Peers, Inc. The software allows its users to share files directly from person to person by using the Gnutella protocol. It runs under Microsoft Windows and comes in several versions, including an advertising supported version, and a paid pro version with no advertisements.

When it comes to Gnutella clients and participation in the Gnutella Developers Forum (GDF), BearShare is seen as one of the frontrunners alongside LimeWire due to its wide implementation of GDF proposals and stable networking. Unfortunately, it has not achieved the same fame as the edonkey network due to a lack of Partial-File Sharing (PFS). However, as of this article, the current version (4.7.1) contains PFS support.

There is, though, bad blood between FreePeers and the developer of Shareaza, Michael Stokes for naming the network his client introduced Gnutella2, without asking or making any note of it in the GDF. Vincent Falco , main developer of BearShare, threatened to ban connections to Shareaza clients for this action. It should be noted that Gnutella2's specifications were quickly released in full, and Shareaza has now been released under the GNU GPL.

See also

• Peer-to-peer - p2p protocols and clients
• Limewire - Gnutella client
• Gnucleus - Gnutella client

External links

• BearShare Official Website