| In recent weeks, in fact, former Napster users have been downloading Gnutella clients so fast that some of their file-distribution sites have been brought to a crawl. But there's one critical difference between Napster and the Gnutella network, over which the new open source Gnucleus software operates. Gnutella's decentralized network architecture makes it impossible for the government to shut the service down without changing the basic way the Internet operates or violating long-established constitutional protections against illegal searches and seizures. Because it can't be shut down, the new Gnucleus software promises to finally force a day of reckoning for the music industry. The question now is whether artists will continue to allow people to distribute their material over the Internet without any opportunity for payment or whether they will at long last rise up and demand that their record companies start making those songs available online legally and at reasonable prices. In the meantime, file sharing is out of the bottle and won't be stuffed back in. The fact that Gnucleus is open source and Windows based means it runs on most computers and will be available permanently, says John Marshall, the 18-year-old New Hampshire high school student who led a team of about a half-dozen other contributors who created the program. "I got tired of what was happening to other file-sharing services," he says. "I wanted to create something that couldn't be shut down or taken away." Marshall learned computer programming out of a book purchased just two years ago. Soft-spoken and modest, he has resisted making Gnucleus available on the most popular software-download sites, preferring to wait until he has time to make additional improvements. Nonetheless, he's already fended off several offers from firms wanting to buy the software for use as an advertising platform, similar to the competing closed-source BearShare Gnutella client, whose advertising practices some users find annoying. "I'm not going to sell out," Marshall says flatly. "That's why it's open source. There's no way anyone can own it." Despite his obvious talent for programming, Marshall plans to study manufacturing engineering at a New England college in the fall. "I don't have any interest in doing computer science," he says. "I've worked for enough computer companies already to know that's not what I want to do." |