OpenFT

OpenFT is a file sharing protocol developed by the giFT project.
The name "OpenFT" stands for "Open FastTrack". Despite this, the OpenFT protocol is an entirely new protocol design: only a few ideas in the OpenFT protocol are drawn from what little was known about the FastTrack protocol at the time OpenFT was designed.

Like FastTrack and Napster, OpenFT is a network where nodess submit lists of shared files to other nodes to keep track of which files are available on the network. This reduces the bandwidth consumed from search requests at the price of additional memory and processing power on the nodes that store that information. The transmission of shared lists is not fully recursive: a node will only transmit its list of shared files to a single search node randomly chosen as that node's "parent", and the list of those files will not be further transmitted to other nodes.

OpenFT is also similar to the Gnutella network in that search requests are recursively forwarded inbetween the nodes that keep track of the shared files.

There are three different kinds of nodes on the OpenFT network:

• USER
  Most nodes are USER nodes; these don't have any special function.
• SEARCH
  These nodes handle search requests; they search the filelists their CHILD
  nodes (explained below) submit to them. These nodes must have a capable
  Internet connection and at least 128M RAM. A modern processor is highly
  recommended as well.
• INDEX
  Nodes with fast connections and lots of memory can be INDEX nodes,
  which keep lists of available search nodes, collect statistics,
  and try to maintain the structure of the network.

For more technical information about OpenFT, you must read the source code, because there's no document covering that at the moment. Also, you can use Doxygen to generate documentation from comments in the source files, using doxygen/doxygen.conf in the CVS repository.

When one says 'OpenFT', one can mean either one of two different things: the OpenFT protocol, or the implementation in the form of a plugin for giFT.

Now, the OpenFT network is in trouble. The structure of the network is failing, which seems to coincide with the increase in popularity of the network, primarily due to the file-sharing client Poisoned. Most Poisoned users are staying as USER nodes, with the result being a huge number of USER nodes with comparatively few SEARCH nodes. There are not enough SEARCH nodes to handle all the USERs, so some OpenFT users are not able to connect to many other users (less than 1000 in most cases) and sometimes none at all. The developers of Poisoned are now encouraging Poisoned users to become SEARCH nodes if their connections and computers can handle it. Once the number of SEARCH nodes grows, the network's structure will improve.