Free server daemon for the original Napster peer 2 peer filesharing protocol

for Unix / Linux and Windows

In early March 2005, http://opennap-ng.org was registered and created, promoting its own version and development of the Opennap NG software. That site is not affiliated to this project pages and development! Since some wrong facts, including personal allegations, are stated there, we felt the necessity for this clarification. If you're just interested in plain facts about this software, skip down to claims and facts. To learn about the whole story, just keep on reading here.

Stagnancy despite improvements being available
You may have noticed, and a number of people complained about it, that for more than past two years there appeared to be very little progress in the development of Opennap NG, after version 0.46 was released. In fact, the project was actually considered dead by most people, including many former Opennap (NG) server owners. Nowadays, many former Opennap server owners use a competitive, closed source software product due to its higher development pace during past two years.

Actually, some of the original Opennap NG development team members had retired around 2002 - 2003. However, better and faster development of the software could have been accomplished in 2003, as there was already a number of changes available, contributed by non-team member volunteers. Those included bugfixes, new features and a rewritten server manual. This changelog describes what well tested changes and extensions could have been available to the public in mid-2003 (bottom of the file, changes until 2003.03.20 - Opennap NG 0.47H).

At that time (summer 2003), there appeared to be only one main, active team maintainer left, who expressed interest in incorporating those developments into Opennap NG. However, until December 2004 only a small fraction of those improvements were actually available in then-newest Opennap NG 0.47.2 version, and only few other changes seemed to have been applied. Most feature extensions, the improved manual and even some bugfixes were missed out.

Decision without discussion
Until December 2004, there appeared to be less changes in 0.47.2 for nearly two years than those who had been written in 2 months in early 2003 (see claims and facts below). Those 2003 changes were meant to become available to the public in mid 2003 but that didn't happen. The other Opennap NG team members learned about the reason for this stagnancy just in January 2005. This (now former) Opennap NG maintainer believed,

he was about the only one who was caring and developping on Opennap NG for two years and did a good job on it,
he was the only one to decide, what features and fixes (not) to incorporate,
the majority of changes and improvements of 0.47H would not be suitable for the official version,
he didn't need to coordinate or discuss his declining decision with other development team members or Opennap server owners beyond his own network,
he didn't even need to inform contributors about his declining attitude but suggested the contributions were welcome.

In other words: it was mainly a single person's decision not to incorporate a major bugfix and feature extension for Opennap NG in mid- or late 2003. The other non-retired Opennap NG team members either didn't know about that contribution or silently believed that former main maintainer would incorporate them properly (which didn't happen). Lack of time and precise knowledge about that situtation resulted in little care and activity by us through most of 2004.

As he admits on his site, that former maintainer picked only those (few) changes he found useful for himself and his own network and silently ignored the rest. Only an excerpt of bugfixes and about none of the long available, "new" features were included in 0.47.2.

(Double?) revival
It took up to January 2005 until the rest of the team fully learned about this "private" decision he made - and we disagreed! The remaining team welcomed the "new" development and chose quickly not only to incorporate them into the Opennap NG server but also to refurbish the project homepage. Suddenly revived development on Opennap NG even triggered the quick creation of a long awaited, multi-platform GUI config tool, to ease server configuration.

When eventually being confronted with this new developments, that particular former team member not only expressed disagreement but also got upset. He made clear he was not interested in discussing the issue with other team members and contributors to seek any sort of agreement, to possibly join efforts to improve Opennap NG. Instead, he quickly chose to leave the SourceForge project! Some weeks later he created http://opennap-ng.org. As mentioned, that site features an old Opennap NG branch, with only a few of the 0.47H changes and none of the 0.49 changes of the SourceForge version incorporated (so far).

False claims
As of March 14th 2005, some false claims are stated on some pages of the http://opennap-ng.org site which we'd like to comment on.

Claim

Fact

Opennap NG 0.49 directly bases on really old 0.45 source version (and not newer 0.46).

The last common base version is Opennap NG 0.46 from November 23rd, 2002, which was a major bugfix release. The two branches which lead to 0.47.2 (limited improvements) and 0.49 (many improvements) split on that version.

Opennap NG 0.49 doesn't contain a lot of bug fixes and enhancements from the 0.46 version, such as Friends status, Elite protected networks, etc.

As NG 0.49 bases on 0.46 it certainly has (or had, see removed items in Changelog and descriptions in the manual) all 0.46 features such as Friends flag and Protnet settings. It's the 0.47.2 branch which didn't contain a number of bug fixes from mid 2003, including occasional CPU hogs, disfunctional leech ejection on standalone servers, etc. 0.47.2 contains about none of the 0.49 feature extensions since 0.46!

It's claimed, a person went behind the then current maintainer's back and (conspiratively?) worked with another SourceForge project admin.

There was a number of communication attempts with that self-proclaimed current maintainer in December 2004 in his network via PM and closed channels, but he ignored them or gave misleading answers. Other SourceForge project admins being contacted after that expressed immediate interest in in-depth changes.

The code from http://opennap-ng.org has been drastically changed from the latest version (which both projects base on). Opennap NG 0.49 allegedly doesn't contain many changes of it.

We've been analyzing differences in src/ directories of different versions, using a standard 'diff -rNU 3' command. While this isn't a precise measure of the functional changes, it may give you a basic idea about the amount of changes between versions.

Versions	Timescale	Size
0.46 --> 0.47	November 2002 - September 2003	46 KB
0.46 --> 0.47.2	November 2002 - August 2004	93 KB
0.46 --> 0.47H	November 2002 - April 2003	103 KB
0.46 --> 0.49	November 2002 - March 2005	>265 KB

Only .c, .h and Makefiles were included in diff. Adding other files and directories would have increased all numbers and decreased their expressiveness, since some version packages contain automatically generated (and regeneratable) files which others don't contain. The mostly rewritten manual for 0.49 alone would add some hundreds KBs in diffs, which are irrelevant in terms of code improvments.
However, it's true that a small number of changes between 0.46 and 0.47.2 isn't contained in 0.49.

Release of Opennap NG 0.49 has pushed the entire project back nearly THREE YEARS

Nonsense.

If you don't know what to believe, here's a simple tip: just compare both versions! Compare feature lists, server performances, changelogs and manuals.