gnutella, edonkey2000, and freenet were released in 2000, as mp3.com and napster were facing litigation. gnutella, released in march, was the first decentralized file sharing network. in the gnutella network, all connecting software was considered equal, and therefore the network had no central point of failure. in july, freenet was released and became the first anonymity network. in september the edonkey2000 client and server software was released.