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Public Software Fund's First Project

Posted by michael on from the money-where-your-mouth-is dept.

Russ Nelson writes "The Public Software Fund's first project has been funded for two months worth of development. Tom Jennings (of Fidonet fame) will be writing software to do peer-to-peer file sharing of free software RPM packages, improving the existing free software packages up2date, /current/, and BitTorrent. This will keep new distro releases from being slashdotted."

6 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Tom Jennings by Pathwalker · · Score: 5, Informative

    He has done a lot more than FidoNet - take a look at some of the artwork he's done recently. ( I suggest taking a look at the Story Teller - very very cool...)

    He also has lots of info on Nixie tubes and builds some cool looking clocks with them (to tie into the earlier /. articles on nixie clocks from a few months back).

  2. Free Porn by SeanTobin · · Score: 3, Informative

    OMG. It really is porn. I figured it'd be a huge advertizement for them or something. Thumbs (yes, thumbs) up to BitTorrent for actually putting some truth in advertizing.

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  3. Re:I just remembered the one thing that makes P2P by Subcarrier · · Score: 3, Informative

    As soon as people start downloading from me, my incoming connection grinds to a halt.

    This is a good point, especially with highly asymmetric systems like cable connections (asymmetry can be as high as 1:40 on these beauties). Some of the uplink capacity is needed for TCP protocol acknowledgement packets. If the uplink becomes congested, the downlink clogs down as well.

    Isn't there any way to make P2P software play nice with the connection and only use the unused outgoing bandwidth?

    It's possible but it requires support from the OS. A quality-of-service implementation like DiffServ can help solve the problem. Packets belonging the P2P traffic could be assigned to the lowest service class so that precendence is always given to other traffic.

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  4. What's the point? by chris_sawtell · · Score: 4, Informative

    BitTorrent works absolutely perfectly.
    Somebody has more money than sense. Just reward the BitTorrent author, if you want to splash money around.

  5. Re:This sucks by vidarh · · Score: 3, Informative
    Have you even read their pages? The donor gets to decide who will do the work. This is just a way for private individuals to hire someone to do open source development work and be able to deduct it from their taxes.

    If you want the original authors to make money, donate money and specify who you want to do the work.

  6. Re:On funding by Russ+Nelson · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you donate $10 to this project, all of it goes to paying Tom to work that much longer on it. Even $10 will help.
    -russ

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