
An Oral History of LimeWire - ohjeez
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/an-oral-history-of-limewire-the-little-app-that-changed-the-music-industry-forever
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mnutt
I took the office pictures that somehow found their way into the article.

I thought LimeWire's efforts to build a music store were probably some of the
less technically interesting things that went on there, and there's tons of
interesting technical fodder, such as the P2P LimeWire update mechanism where
the lead dev would sign an update, update his local LimeWire, join the
network, and the update would spread virally. (and how they very nearly lost
control of the network due to it) Or that LimeWire was ostensibly
decentralized, but ran a set of centralized UDP host caches so that you could
actually _find_ other peers when you joined the network.

~~~
huhtenberg
> _Photos courtesy Rochelle DiRe_

I take you are not Mrs DiRe.

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mnutt
No, I don't remember specifically but I likely shared them with a bunch of
people and after all we _were_ LimeWire...

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weare138
And everyone wonders why we illegally downloaded so much music back then...

From the article: _' The fact that users would “own” songs was the deal-
breaker for a lot of the dinosaur record labels. I remember one meeting with a
music label I won’t name, where the exec in the room basically told us, “If
you listen to a Madonna song, I want you to pay us for that privilege. You
never own music, you simply buy a license to consume that music at that
moment. Next year, when you want to listen to that same song, I want you to
pay us again. Thirty years from now, when your grandchildren want to listen to
that Madonna song, I want them to pay us. You will never own this music, you
only buy a temporary right to listen to that music at that moment, nothing
more.”'_

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andrew_
The case from 2010 would surely make for a fascinating retrospective today.
I'd wager it hasn't aged well.

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Fnoord
Why was it LimeWire, and not KaZaA (which had supernodes), or AudioGalaxy
(which used the browser as UI), or SoulSeek (which I used; and had an amazing
community). Not to mention eDonkey/eMule/DCPP and a whole slew more, such as
BitTorrent. Or how about Usenet?

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nyolfen
i would kill for that jacket

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Fnoord
Nowadays you can design such online, by just uploading a picture or two. At
least it is like that with t-shirts. Not sure about jackets specifically.

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mnutt
The jackets have the letters sewn on rather than printed on, but I think the
person who ordered them just said “give me whatever green letters you have”
which was why they weren’t on brand, and also part of the charm.

