After reading this list for a week, I get the impression that many people see FreeNet as a piece of a larger application. I have read one post about FreeNet being half of a total anonymous solution. OK, so, being a glutton for flaming, please allow me to put on my "space shuttle tile undies" and step into the mix.
I have considered volunteering my time to Gnutella for a few weeks now and basically find it one huge cluster of a mess. The minute I saw my IP address going out there for God and Country, I knew that Gnutella was *NOT* for me. Further investigation just reinforced this fact (i.e. 50% of bandwidth just for pings and pongs!) Still, Gnutella has many things going for it, but I would never put anything into that network that I was not willing to hand out on a public street corner. Now, today, I read about the ambition of having FTP replaced with FreeNet or something like it. I say "ABSOLUTELY!", but I think that a rather obvious point needs to be brought up. In the end, what is *REALLY* needed is an *EASY TO USE* application that allows: 1) fast public searches (see #3), 2) the ability to host public files, 3) some type of searchable metadata directory, 4) fast downloads (caching combined with Digital Fountain-type downloading?), 5) anonymous searches and downloads (with a willingness to sacrifice speed and bandwidth), 6) anonymous hosting. Napster did #1 and #2 well. Gnutella makes an attempt at #1, does #2, and is making progress in #3 and #4. Morpheus is arguably better, but is in legal trouble. I am reading a lot here about work on #5 and #6. So *WHO* is working on building one single application that is able to bring this all together? *THAT* is the open source project I want to donate my time and coding talents to. Now maybe I will get flamed for saying this, but this is what will be ultimately required for all of this to come together and succeed. Gnutella, and Napster before it, are/were successful because it made finding the data you wanted easy for Joe User. Napster did not do anything that was not being done with IRC, Gopher and FTP ... it just made the "Idiot's Guide" version. If you can build a network/protocol that makes data easy to publish, easy to find, and easy to download, people will use it. If people are using it, businesses will come. If you add the anonymous features, the "fringe element" will come. Soon, you have a large, happy, "legitimate" community all using the same pipes to push bits. The more bits going through the pipes, the harder it is single out a single packet, the more easy it is for the anonymous traffic to hide in the crowd. If you added the ability to tie into Web Services, it would be a no-brainer. So now, my questions: 1) Is anyone working on something like this? 2) If not, is it worth starting an open source project to try to do it? 3) Where would you start? Build a Gnutella client and add FreeNet/AnonNet to it or Start over from scratch with JXTA and a new open source protocol? 4) What should be included in the protocol? Sorry for the long post. Thanks for reading it. hfw3 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Check out Yahoo! Shopping and Yahoo! Auctions for all of your unique holiday gifts! Buy at http://shopping.yahoo.com or bid at http://auctions.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ freenet-tech mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/tech
