Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It | Hacker News

Gnutella began at Nullsoft, the company behind Winamp, and was briefly released to the public.

AOL quickly shut it down, but the protocol kept running because it was decentralized.

Since no central server controlled it, users and developers could continue using and reverse engineering it.

The episode highlighted both the resilience of peer-to-peer systems and the limits of trying to stop them after release.