Shareaza

As most of you probably know already, Limewire has been ordered to stop distributing its software to the public. What will this mean for Shareaza?

Not much of anything, really.

An independent open source fork of Limewire was created years ago when the legal problems started, people will simply move to that.

And the legal problems Limewire had don't really apply to Shareaza since we don't actually do the things that got them into trouble.

hmm.. I was also wondering about this. Anyone think it will affect the gnutella1 service?

Most probably. Not all users that switch to an other P2P client now that LW has gone will switch to an other gnutella(1) client, so it is to be expected that the overall number of users on the gnutella network significantly drops...
The current torrentfreak article on the LW case for example contains massive speculation on lots of users switching to BitTorrent clients instead. However, that is all speculation. They might as well all switch to eD2k clients or maybe a lot of them decides to use Shareaza instead... who knows.

The overall effect was only temporary, most of which is already over.

A lot of LimeWire users were never cut off because they didn't have the
versions which could be shut off. It won't be long before the minority who
had versions 5.5.12-5.5.16 realize that 5.5.10 and earlier are still working.

At least we didn't have a massive increase over the past few days (according to the crawler)...

It will probably cause an increase in the use of other P2P clients like Shareaza and Frostwire. Some might even downgrade their version of Limewire as well.

According to the crawler, the number of unique nodes on G2 has increased significantly over the past 2 weeks.