Today marks the 15th anniversary of the intended closure of WinMX by its creator Frontcode / WinMX Technologies under threat of legal action from the RIAA.
Instead of scoring a crushing victory over one of many filesharing networks they had in their sights the RIAA's actions instead awoke a sleeping giant of collective mind power and the will to fight for our friendships.
This major event marked the birth of our independent community when the users decided strongly that this sprawling network was something more than a simple file sharing network, it was in reality a network of friendship forged in the many chat rooms and consisted of the happy, the sad, the creatives, the contrarians, the practical and quite often the zany and mad all arrivng on the network looking to build connections & interact with real folks living real lives like themselves.
Those bonds of friendship within this community have powered it on since those dark days when many thought the network was doomed, instead of despair hope was born and solutuions delivered from within our own community,
15 years is a substantial period of time for us all to celebrate and as a community we should all be proud of this acheivement but as always we should also be thankful there are some great folks behind the scenes past and present maintaining our ability to use the network freely and its those good folks spread across the globe whom are always going to be the real heroes of our community, some of you know who they are and many of you dont but rest assured they care about this network, their friends and this community and many are still in the chat rooms alongside the rest of you, lets give them a massive thank you and spare a few minutes of our thoughts to thank them for what they do for the rest of us year in and year out.
Thanks to you too reader, together as a community we continue to interact despite a succession of obstacles in the road along the many years, always remember that you too are a key part part of a winning team in a free community of minds, there lies the most powerful thing we all have at our disposal.
Happy anniversary folks.and please join me in delivering our personal thanks to all those who go the extra mile for the rest of us.