The next day, AOL stopped the availability of the program over legal concerns and restrained Nullsoft from doing any further work on the project. The source code was to be released later, under the GNU General Public License (GPL) however, the original developers never got the chance to accomplish this purpose. The event was prematurely announced on Slashdot, and thousands downloaded the program that day. On March 14, the program was made available for download on Nullsoft's servers. The first client (also called Gnutella) from which the network got its name was developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper of Nullsoft in early 2000, soon after the company's acquisition by AOL. In late 2007, it was the most popular file-sharing network on the Internet with an estimated market share of more than 40%.

In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million computers increasing to over three million nodes by January 2006. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model.

Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Comparison of Internet Relay Chat clients.

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