Who is LimeWire?

LimeWire has never been an ordinary company; nor do we intend to become one.

Throughout our evolution, we have emphasized innovation and transformation. We are in the business of making a difference for our users – a business that everyone in the company is passionate about.

LimeWire is a company that is organized around the ability to attract, cultivate and leverage the talent of exceptional technologists and business people. Our team now numbers about 100. While this number seems big relative to our humble beginnings, its small compared to the size of our ambitions. We hope to recruit many more in the future, and we will treat them well.

We are extremely proud of our pioneering history. We began programming LimeWire ten years ago with the belief that peer-to-peer (P2P) would become one of the core distribution tools of the internet. Today, that belief is a reality.

LimeWire is remarkably robust, cheap, stable and efficient at distributing files. Since each LimeWire user can play the role of either client or server, any one LimeWire user can download files from every other LimeWire user on the network. As a result, far greater processing power is created and a far faster spread of information emerges than any one server could ever provide by itself. Every day, millions of people from virtually every country in the world use LimeWire to form ad hoc networks, search for and share all kinds of files.

With increasing size and popularity come increasing scrutiny and a certain amount of skepticism. The current lawsuit has thrown a spotlight on LimeWire. But people who pit LimeWire against the music industry are either disingenuous or just don’t know us. A few of us have worked on the corporate side of the music industry; others are musicians and songwriters. Many of us have deep experience with digital media and cutting-edge technology. Most of us are music fans. And all of us share a common goal in the commercial advancement of digital music. We’re proud of this mission, and proud of who we are.

The music industry and LimeWire now each face their greatest opportunity. We are excited about the possibilities and hope that LimeWire can be the company to help make those possibilities real – with the support of the entire music industry.

This new challenge punctuates the end of our first decade as a company – a decade that has brought great change to LimeWire, the P2P and music industries, and the Internet as a whole. As rich as our history is, I am very excited about what the next ten years will bring and firmly believe the best is yet to come.

We will remain an extraordinary company and, in this blog, we’ll give you our perspective on the issues we face, explain our plans and the reasoning and values behind them.