WinMX
The file-sharing client that outlived Napster and became Japan's favorite: queue positions, upload slots, a couple thousand chat rooms and a network that refused to die. When the RIAA shut its maker down in September 2005, two community patches had the whole thing back online within days, and the patched network kept running for years.
WinMX was written in 2000 by Kevin Hearn, president of a small company called Frontcode Technologies in Windsor, Ontario, and released on December 4 of that year. It began as an OpenNap client, a program that could connect to several of the open Napster-protocol servers at once, which made it the natural place to go after Napster itself was choked off. In May 2001 WinMX 2 added Frontcode's own WinMX Peer Network Protocol, with the company running the peer-cache servers that told clients where to find each other. The design had quirks that became habits: files were capped at 2 GB so the program would still run on Windows 98, a Primary connection could share 5,000 visible files and a Secondary one 3,000, and the menus were translated into 16 languages.
That last detail mattered more than anyone expected. A 2002 Recording Industry Association of Japan report found that 84 percent of Japanese file-sharing users had used WinMX, mostly for J-pop MP3s, and it stayed Japan's main client until Winny and LimeWire overtook it in 2007. One study found it the number one source for online music in 2005, with about 2.1 million users. At its height the network hosted somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 chat rooms at any given moment, plus third-party upload managers like MxMonitor and Leechhammer that throttled leechers who shared nothing.
The end came fast. In June 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in the Grokster case, that a company distributing software used for infringement could be held liable, and on September 13, 2005, Frontcode received a cease-and-desist letter from the RIAA demanding that it either filter copyrighted downloads or shut down. On September 21 the WinMX website and Frontcode's peer caches went offline, and the company abandoned development. By September 23 two unofficial patches from unrelated websites had changed the DNS lookup the client used to find its peer caches, pointing it at new caches run by the community, and WinMX was back. A joint community patch unified everyone on one set of caches on September 20, 2008, the third anniversary of the rescue; a protocol-level attack by a disgruntled community developer scrambled searches in May 2011; and an open-source replacement client called OurMx reached public beta in September 2013. The network outlived the company that built it.
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