What Really Happened?
Confused? So is the rest of the industry. The question no one can answer is why Morpheus suddenly quit working. StreamCast claims that KaZaA BV didn't properly explain how to use the FastTrack software. "We'd been given the product and paid for it quarterly, but had never been given the documentation on how to make it work, and one day we woke up and were no longer able to access the network," says Trey Bowles, StreamCast director of marketing.
Yet KaZaA BV representatives have been quoted as saying that StreamCast's FastTrack license was revoked because the company failed to make its payments. Meanwhile, Sharman's official statement on the matter alludes to malicious behavior from StreamCast's machines: "Sharman Network's technical team discovered that the KaZaA.com Web site was being bombarded by hundreds of thousands of http requests, and our http logs indicate that these requests were referred by the Morpheus/MusicCity ad server."
What really happened? We may never know. But the end result is that Gnutella now has several million more users than it did in late February. The new Morpheus client, based on Gnucleus, an open source Gnutella client, has been downloaded more than 25 million times in the past three weeks. And, according to estimates from LimeWire, the size of the Gnutella network has increased five-fold.