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Originally Posted by zalas
Winny does support the bits and pieces thing when possible. However, once you fully download a file, or if you share a directory, Winny will share the entire file until you delete it from the cache or unshare it. Hence, once you finish downloading a file, you'll continue sharing it.
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That's still quite a bit different I think. With freenet the idea is no one person really has the whole file and no one even knows what they have. All you do is set aside so much disk space - say 500meg - for freenet to use as it likes, but it's (hopefully) impossible for anyone to really know what's there. That's why you can't finger a single user as sharing a particular file. No one person is sharing it, but any freenet member may (or may not) have a bit of it at any given time. The idea is to keep it completely unrelated to what you upload or download, so when you get a file you get it from the network as a whole rather from a set of specific users.
Freenet's original goal was to allow people to publish files anonymously, but to achieve that it sacrifices efficiency. It's a neat idea, but not really very fast or very good for large files. It also suffers if too few nodes stay connected full time.