After Nullsoft (developers of the popular Winamp MP3 player) was acquired by America Online, members of the Nullsoft team went to work on an open-source, file-sharing application called Gnutella. They posted the source code on the Web, but AOL removed it after it was downloaded 10,000 times in less than a day. Developers continued to work on the code, but after all the hype about the "next Napster," the open-source project has ground to a halt due to media pressure and fragmentation within the developer community.

Gnutella is easy to find and download -- then the trouble begins. We looked around the site and found the URL that gets you to the initial IP connection. We immediately hooked up with 253 hosts, 60,000 files, and 44 million megabytes of files. Among them, 21 people had Radiohead files and only three had broadband connections. No songs off of the Radiohead album "Kid A" were available. After five minutes of chewing on the search query "Kid A MP3," nothing came up. Blindly choosing IP addresses to add to the connection list was awkward. It amazed us that in one hour no one chose to download any of the popular files we had available to "share."

• Typical download speed: 2
  
• Ease of use: 2
  
• Number of Apples in Stereo songs found: 0
  
• Number of Radiohead songs found: 21