Slashdot Mirror
Public Software Fund's First Project
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."
The "slashdotted" link has an interesting link about another name for the /. effect... the "flash crowd"
Larry Niven's 1973 SF short story "Flash Crowd" predicted that one consequence of cheap teleportation would be huge crowds materializing almost instantly at the sites of interesting news stories. Twenty years later the term passed into common use on the Internet to describe exponential spikes in website or server usage when one passes a certain threshold of popular interest (what this does to the server may also be called slashdot effect).
Before everyone starts screeming, "Why only development for Redhat!" you may note that John Gilmore (evidently a Redhat guy) donated the money for this project. I don't know why Redhat didn't just hire the guy.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
We are currently running a BitTorrent load test at:
http://66.139.73.165/
If you would like to help out an open source content distribution network we would greatly appreciate it!
I think this program is a really great concept... I eagerly downloaded the client and started the download of the test file, when I was quickly reminded of what ruins every P2P program I've tried. As soon as people start downloading from me, my incoming connection grinds to a halt. It literally just took me 5 minutes to get back to this page in order to write my reply. Once all of my upstream bandwidth is used, my download speed drops to almost nothing, leaving me with virtually no connection the entire time I'm trying to download whatever it is I'm getting, which takes even longer because my connection is so slow. Isn't there any way to make P2P software play nice with the connection and only use the unused outgoing bandwidth?
Posting as AC because I'm too lazy to login...
My experience, (as of a few minutes ago.)
.torrent links, click "Advanced", navigate to, and select the executable. Click OK. Then choose "Open using", browse, select the executable again, OK, click the "Open using" radio button again, (some kind of bug makes the final "OK" deselected somewhere.) And click the final OK. Everything seems to be configured.
The installer simply says that "BitTorrent will now work under Internet Explorer", or words to that effect. No status screen, no readme, no "install to directory". Just a simple dialog box. Well, it turns out, BitTorrent is automatically installed to "%programdir%\BitTorrent" with the executable named "btdownloadprefetched.exe". So, click on one of the
Interesting algo. Lots of interesting side effects. Accurate download stats for who and how many times. Upstream connections only during a flash crowd, (or so it seems).
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that up2date in its current form is hopelessly married to Red Hat's services, and not a generally applicable piece of software. If I am correct about this, I can hardly see it as a free software victory when development money is going to improve such a limited and vendor specific program. The most obvious effect of this development would be to take the demand off of RedHat's servers, and put it on those of its users. A shrewd technique, but not exactly a public service. BitTorrent development from this project might well be a great help to the community, however.
Another complementary project in progress is the Open Content Network
The OCN provides an important piece of the puzzle with its metadata proxy servers. These servers automatically generate the verification information (SHA-1 hashes) necessary to perform secure P2P downloads.
It would be nice if this project leveraged the significant amount of work going into the OCN to provide a standard way to securely delivery any open source content across peer-to-peer networks.
Check out the OCN specifications here.