---------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------- Subject: Speaking at Linucon From: "Brandon Wiley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Fri, April 2, 2004 3:30 pm To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Rose (SXSW technical coordinator) referred me to your delightful local Linux/gaming conference. He suggested that you might have a place for me to give a talk or participate in or organize a panel. My expertise is primarily in peer-to-peer software. My focus is not on file-sharing applications, but on applying techniques of decentralization to a wide range of problems such as Internet radio, MMORPGs, and censorship resistance. My most popular Open Source project was Freenet, a peer-to-peer network designed to facilitate censorship-resistant web sites. I am the President of The Foundation for Decentralization Research, a 501(c)3 non-profit foundation which sponsors research into the application of peer-to-peer technology to the real problems of people. I have spoken at a number of conferences previously including SXSW, Defcon, Blackhat, CodeCon, O'Reilly's Peer-to-Peer Conferences, academic conferences at Berkeley and MIT, and the Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise, at which one of your other speakers, Eric Raymond, also spoke. I have contributed to books for O'Reilly, Hungry Minds, and Addison-Welsey and written articles for Linux Journal. I have a number of ideas for speaking topics that might be suitable to this conference. From reading over the website, I think the most compelling idea I have is a talk or panel on decentralizing MMORPGs. This emerging game form is dominated by large corporations because of the high cost of entry and maintenance. This limits the creativity of the games by making quick return on investment the primary motivation behind design choices. With the application of peer-to-peer technology to MMORPGs, the servers are eliminated and thus the cost of running them. Hardware and bandwidth costs shrink to nothing. The focus is then on creating content and providing technical support. This lowers the cost of entry so as to make it accessible to small companies and hobbyists. We have a demonstration engine which shows off this technology called Gnosis. It's free and open source and runs on Linux, Windows, and OS X. If you'd like to discuss this further, you can reach me by e-mail or at my mobile phone at (512) 750-8474.
