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Industrial-Strength P2P

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the something-to-think-about dept.

hhutkin writes "Business 2.0 has an article in their latest issue on Bill Joy and Sun's peer-to-peer play, Jxta." A bit light on details but still good to know progress is being made in the field of peer to peer apps. But don't expect anything useful any time soon.

2 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Who pays for P2P? by Artifice_Eternity · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is what I don't understand. Unless it's either a paid-subscription model (pay to join) or a truly, totally distributed and open-source system (there are NO central servers of any kind), I'm not sure how P2P can make money.

    Of course not all web sites have to make money. Once upon a time, pre-dot-com-boom, this was common knowledge. P2P networks run by dedicated enthusiasts may have the best chance of survival. Those are the kind of sites I've always liked best anyway...done for love, not money.

    1. Re:Who pays for P2P? by bourne · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The question isn't who pays, it is who benefits.

      Think of P2P as a way of efficiently distributing data and/or processing. The key word here is efficiently. Consider DNS, a distributed database. DNS is the system that was designed to allow the Internet to scale up from modest beginnings, and it exceeded expectations (and continues to do so) for scalability. It's the glue that keeps the Internet going, and which works better than a lot of newer, application-layer protocols (HTTP - been slashdotted lately?)

      Therefore, an efficient and easily usable P2P framework allows application builders to build things that work better and faster than is available today. This isn't the new car - it's the new road.

      Once you get the road built, then you start figuring out how to make money off of it. No one makes money off of DNS, but there's money to be made of the Internet that it enables (pr0n if nothing else!)