Re: [GNUnet-developers] Miscellaneous Ideas

[Igor Wronsky]

On Sun, 28 Mar 2004, Christian Grothoff wrote:

> > For example, with Freenet, when you publish content, you only need to
> > upload the file you want to publish once (together with some check
> > blocks for FEC).  With BitTorrent, you must distribute it from a central
> > server, and it might be downloaded many times over from that server
> > until there are enough people out there sharing the file.  In most
> > cases, BitTorrent will require orders of magnitude more of the
> > publisher's upstream bandwidth than Freenet would.
> Right, there are many dimensions to consider here (total bandwidth, latency,
> publisher bandwidth, receiver bandwidth, CPU, memory, disk-space for the
> storage in the network, etc.).  That's why I did not add that kind of
> category to the list, the table already simplifies far too much :-).

I understand that both of you somewhat identify with the
aforementioned technologies, but the plain fact is
that BitTorrent has been able to deliver very reliably
all the time I've known of its existence, and if we remove
anonymity and censorship resistance from the desiderata,
GNUnet or Freenet can hardly compete at all, as BT scales
nicely in both content sizes and peer amounts, and gives
really schwell throughput in practice, in addition that
you perfectly know what you're contributing your bandwidth
on.

I wouldn't be much concerned about what label we can put on BT,
or how appealing it is intellectually - if it is among the best
software technologies currently available for distribution of
large scale, legal content, for those without much resources,
fine. I don't care about the details. And I know Freenet well
enough to be aware that even if the daily fix of Freenet
were working fine, the 'hit-and-run' publishing model could
still not be considered reliable practice for content
distribution.

To Ian (who might not know), I've been something of a GNUnet
developer for quite long -- but I'm in no way affliated with
BitTorrent. Neither is this an intent to start a flame war.
This is, in my opinion, simply a statement from personal
experience, along with an idea that any table like that
in a FAQ (usually targeted for newbies), should be truthful,
and should show that we understand our position on the
field in general. From my viewpoint, the table is there
because ppl would like to understand the pros and
cons of the different options _in practice_, and are
not particularly keen on what slogans make each tick.

Politically, any adaptation of open source filesharing
tech (no matter what the name of the product) is in our
interest. If ppl like BT, and find it suited to them,
we should give them a fair pointer to it.


Igor