giFT Internet File Transfer (giFT) is a computer software daemon that allows several file sharing protocols to be used with a simple client having a graphical user interface (GUI). The client dynamically loads plugins implementing the protocols, as they are required. The protocols are:

Stable

OpenFT, giFT's own file sharing protocol

Gnutella (used by BearShare, LimeWire, ...)

Ares Galaxy

Turtle F2F

Beta version

FastTrack (used by Kazaa). The GiFT plugin is giFT-FastTrack.

Alpha version

OpenNap

eDonkey

Soulseek

The clients communicate with the giFT process using a lightweight network protocol; the protocol code is completely abstracted from the user interface. There are already several giFT GUI front-ends for Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh, and Unix-like operating systems.

The name giFT is a recursive acronym.

giFT is written using comparatively cross-platform C code.

giFT currently lacks unicode support included, and it is very hard to share files with characters such as "ø","ä", "å", "é", "è", "ó", "ö", "ù", "ü" in their names.

OpenFT protocol

giFT's sibling project is OpenFT, a peer-to-peer file sharing network protocol that has 'search' nodes and 'index' supernodes in addition to common nodes. According to the giFT documentation:

Search nodes handle search requests. They search the filelists their CHILD (common) nodes submitted to them. These nodes must have a capable Internet connection and at least 128M RAM. A modern processor is highly recommended as well.

and

INDEX nodes keep lists of available search nodes, collect statistics, and try to maintain the structure of the network.

giFT front-ends