p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- LimeWire,  a pale shadow of what it used to be, is once again under attack from the entertainment cartels.

But its code is still out there doing good.

Ask the guys at FrostWire, an excellent, and free, community driven p2p project based on source code released by LimeWire LLC.

Now meet Zab’s MuWire, another free, open-source LimeWire fork created specifically to help people share music.

“It tries to be as minimalist as possible,” he told p2pnet.

“It only shares music files which makes it inherently safer from viruses, especially for non-techies.”

Why minimalist? – we asked Zab, a one-time LimeWire staffer.

“Over the years, I saw a lot of features and bloat added to Limewire,” he said. “I’m was hoping the new interface in 5.0 would take care of it, but its still too complicated.  So I decided to go in the other direction and create something as simple as possible.”

We asked what the differences were.

“No Bittorrent, no buddy list, no music store, nothing to distract the user from getting music,” was the response. “Another positive side effect is that it starts up twice as fast as Limewire 5.”

p2pnet: What does it handle?

Zab: Only to .mp3, .m4a .ogg and .flac files.”

p2pnet: But you’re still going to be a target …

Zab: By minimizing MuWire, we’re not only making it more idiot-proof, users won’t be able to download viruses or share their tax returns — even if they try to.

p2pnet: What about porn?

Zab: It’s family-friendly because there’s no adult material.

p2pnet: What’s coming up?

Zab: One thing I could add to the future plans part is a native interface using SWT.  Java has a bad rep for being slow and while I can’t ditch it completely, I might be able to rewrite the user interface to use native components.  It all depends on free time and how many users want it, so I’m not making any promises

Stay tuned.

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under attack -  In economic crisis, Obama goes after LimeWire, April, 2009