Free Limewire Pro for president article

Mike Pallin - 26.11.2011

Alternatives to limewire

LimeWire was an incredibly popular file sharing program which was launched to the public in May of 2000.  It enabled subscribers to share files (most commonly – music files) with each other. With millions of users on the system, the data base of music files available to LimeWire users was vast.  Between 2000 and 2010, many enhancements were introduced to the program and its bugs and weaknesses were systematically eliminated.  In 2010 the court ruled against the Lime Group LLC in a copyright infringement case, charging that LimeWire was guilty of committing and enabling copyright infringement in the music industry.  In October 2010 the company was ordered to disable the system. The type of service provided by Limewire is something really attractive to Internet users.  What alternatives are there to take the place of LimeWire and continue to provide this service?  The purpose of this article is to examine some of these services and to attempt some sort of assessment.  It must be noted that the old LimeWire may have been stopped from going on but millions of users continue to use it since the program still operates on the Gnutella network.  You can still download the program from sites such as limewirefreedownload.org.  One must assume that future enhancements and upgrades will not be available if you decide to follow this route. FrostWire FrostWire was launched in 2004 by LimeWire members of the open source community in protest to some blocking features being contemplated by LimeWire in an attempt to avoid legal action from the   Recording Industry Association of America.  The program is very similar to LimeWire and contains all of the functionality associated with that program.  Since October 2010 FrostWire has gained in popularity.  One big difference between FrostWire and LimeWire is that FrostWire has dropped the Gnutella network in favour of BitTorrent.      LimeWire Pirate Edition/WireShare   The Pirate Edition was simply a mirror image of the old LimeWire program with one or two omissions.  It was launched 2 days after the court ordered Lime Wire to cease the operations of LimeWire.  The LimeWire team has denied the charge that they were behind the Pirate initiative but after a court order was issued to close down the Pirate Edition website, this was done.  The source code of the Pirate Edition was then altered by removing all LimeWire copyrights and the resulting program launched as WireShare.  This is available for download onto your machine right now.  If the main LimeWire developers are responsible for this program then it could be a very solid alternative to the old LimeWire.   uTorrent uTorrent is a service which bills itself as “Super fast.  Ultra light”referring to the fact that they use the attributes of BitTorrent to speed downloads without the need for more power.  They characterise their features as being “tiny, easy, accessible, innovative, fast, cool cutting edge and intelligent.”Reviews on the Internet confirm that the program has all of these attributes.  Negatives include the difficulty in finding torrents and the program being almost impossible to uninstall.  There are also some reservations about virus checking of uploads.     Vuse Another alternative to LimeWire is Vuse which bills itself as the “most powerful BitTorrent on earth.” A recent review found that this program is ideal for novices who need an easy program to plug and play with no learning curve required.  The interface is very much like iTunes and is therefore easy for most users.  A significant website obtained a 4 out of 5 star rating from 1962 respondents for this product.  Reservations have been voiced around the downloading of full length movies but for music, most users have no complaints.