Shareaza

Shareaza is a Microsoft Windows–based peer-to-peer client which supports the Gnutella, Gnutella2, EDonkey Network, and BitTorrent network protocols and which can handle magnet links, ed2k links, Piolet links, and the now deprecated Gnutella links. It was originally developed as closed-source freeware by Michael Stokes, and is now Open source under the GNU General Public License.

In late 2002, Stokes introduced Gnutella2, a reworked version of Gnutella with many fundamental updates to the protocol, and added support for it to Shareaza. This drew a lot of criticism from other Gnutella developers, because Gnutella2 was developed without any outside help or conferral. However, the Gnutella2 network has been doing well so far despite the fact that it was developed privately, and is now supported by Shareaza, MLdonkey, Adagio (computer program), Gnucleus, and Morpheus (computer program). Opponents of the name Gnutella2 refer to it as Mike s Protocol , or MP for short.

On 1 June 2004, Shareaza 2.0 was released, along with the source code, under the GNU GPL, making it free software. Version 2.1 was released on 19 September 2004, and included many bug fixes including better support for Windows XP Service Pack 2.

The current stable version is 2.2.1.0 as of October 28, 2005, [http://forums.shareaza.com//showthread.phps=&threadid=44364].

Shareaza is available in 18 languages.

Users of Shareaza (along with Azureus and LimeWire) have frequently been targeted in internet scams such as Etomi that demand a membership fee for use of the software.

=See also=

*List of BitTorrent clients *Comparison of BitTorrent clients

=External links=

*[http://www.shareaza.com Official Site] *[http://wiki.shareaza.com/static/ Knowledge base on Shareaza] *[http://www.gnutella2.com/ Gnutella 2 home] *[http://sourceforge.net/projects/shareaza/ Shareaza Project page]