[citation needed] Clients implementing frontends for the giFT daemon communicate with its process using a lightweight network protocol.

The giFT daemon is written using relatively cross-platform C code, which means that it can be compiled for and executed on a big variety of operating systems.

Since both projects are related very closely, when one says 'OpenFT', one can mean either one of two different things: the OpenFT protocol, or the implementation in the form of a plugin for giFT.

This reduces the bandwidth consumed from search requests at the price of additional memory and processing power on the nodes that store that information.

[4] OpenFT is also similar to the gnutella network in that search requests are recursively forwarded in between the nodes that keep track of the shared files.