On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 11:24 AM, Florent Daigniere < nextg...@freenetproject.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2015-11-03 at 10:43 -0600, Ian wrote: > Most of their funding comes from the government and they have ensured > that their technology can be used by them (those sponsors). > A long time ago I also sought funding from the US government. They were interested but in the end they didn't bite. Remember that Tor was designed by the US Navy, that gave them a pretty big advantage when it came to seeking government funding. > We have created a technology that is meant to "fight" governments... > while carefully avoiding any specific usecase that would have attracted > their wrath (the copyright infringement brigade, ...) but would have > significantly increased the user-base. > Building "Napster 2" was never my goal, nor the goal of anyone involved in the project during its first few years. Going down that route would simply have ensnared us in legal turmoil (meaning that most or all of our donations would have gone to pay for lawyers). > In your initial "project status" email, your focus seems to be "paying > the bills". Is that the problem at hand? If so we do need a strategy. > I believe I was referring to myself, not the project. I have bills to pay. > > We don't because we chose not to. We could have settled on a simpler > > > problem; > > > > > > Sure, there are an infinity of other problems we could have settled > > on, but > > then that wouldn't be Freenet. > > > > I've always thought that Freenet can't be anything more than a research > project. You've conveniently dropped that alternative from my reply. > > If we agree that Freenet is a reseach project then we can look at how > we can fund such a thing. Freenet is a research project, or it has been, it's also software that people can download and use. These aren't mutually exclusive, in fact it's pretty-much impossible to experiment with P2P software in a lab, you have to deploy it. > The classical answer is publishing and grants > (what GNUnet does) and/or no paid staff. > Those guys are academics, publishing and finding grants is their skillset. We have published papers in the past (by people like Theodore Hong, who is an academic and therefore it's his skillset). Nothing to prevent people from publishing papers and/or applying for grants. The problem is that that isn't the skillset of the current volunteers. People seem to be under the impression that I can simply decree that "we will now publish papers and apply for grants" and it will happen. It doesn't work like that. If a volunteer decides to do it and then does it, then it will happen, if they don't, it won't. I can't tell people to do anything that they don't want to do. > We've never used the funding we had for publishing nor applying for > more grants; maybe we should have. > Because it wasn't anyone's skillset, but if someone wanted to do it and had the skillset to do it, they were free to do it. > If we don't agree on the fact that Freenet is a research project then > I'd like to be told what it is (or meant to be). The current security > model doesn't fit anyone's use-case. > I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "research project", or what impact you think it would have for us to declare that Freenet is a "research project". It wouldn't suddenly cause people to start throwing grants at us, someone still has to do the work of applying, and there is nothing to prevent them from doing that today. > Years ago (back when I had free time) I meant to fork the project, I've > regretted not doing so ever since. I've never liked the trade-offs > financial concerns made us do. To give you an example: > opennet/darknet/hybrid. If it had been up to me, Opennet wouldn't have > existed and Darknet might be usable by now... but the concern at the > time was how to find funds for Matthew. > It wasn't about funding. The concern at the time was that a darknet-only Freenet has a very serious cold-start problem, because it dramatically raises the barrier to entry for joining the network, since it requires that you already know someone that runs Freenet. Opennet was a way to get around that problem. Ian. _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl@freenetproject.org https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
