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 perfect chance for P2P to redeem itself from being label as illegal activity only. Unfortunately, it won't appeal to 90% of users, so it won't. The idea is still nice.
"Oh no, 3 horny women and only 2 condoms...Thank god I read slashdot"
If I'm not mistaken, N'Sync has a little-known song named "apache.tgz". Also, Brititany has done "kernel-2.4.19.tgz".
;)
Oh, well...it was a nice idea while it lasted.
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
Why don't they fund the original authors and
contributors to provide the desired enhancements
instead of locking them out? Sure. Screw the
innovators and featherbed your pals. This is just
corrupt, and there's no way any of my companies will
be contributing to that fund. Cronyism pretending
to be public service. Pffft.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
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...)
/. articles on nixie clocks from a few months back).
He also has lots of info on Nixie tubes and builds some cool looking clocks with them (to tie into the earlier
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!
The mean-spirited and outright nasty comments that have gotten attached to every post mentioning Gene Kan's death remind me of why I cringe every time Slashdot announces that someone has died. Although it would be nice for Slashdot to provide a place for those of us touched by this tragedy to pay our respects, I'm actually relieved that they haven't. It would be painful to see all the trash that some of the miscreant AC's who hang out here would post.
Goodbye, Gene.
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.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
now... if you just bounced onto that company online -- what goes on in your mind?
1) public fund open source software company
2) beer related software company
3) beer
my reaction was somewhere between 2 and 3 above, leaning strongly toward 3...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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).
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.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
As far as I can tell, there's nothing Red Hat specific about the project. Linux clients not already using up2date can, as far as I see it, still install up2date and use Current servers to provide their packages rather than Red hat network.
Linux clients who can't install RPM packages (there aren't many) aren't compliant with the Linux Standard Base.
BitTorrent works absolutely perfectly.
Somebody has more money than sense. Just reward the BitTorrent author, if you want to splash money around.
It's nice and all to have a P2P RPM network, but the money would have been better spent improving RPM's.
.... P to be installed where RPM's D-P are obscure features that no-one ever uses.
RPM's need to be made far more granuler this would sort out all thoes evil dep problems which in my experiance are.
RPM X requires RPM's A B C D E
No if all RPM's were in nice sized chunks you would only have to install the chunk you wanted/required. This would keep the install base down, and force packagers/programmers to do things in a nice modula way.
Also... Why can't I use source RPM's that optionally compile themselfs after install...
Why don't RPM's seem to be signed!!!
RPM's should have "where can i get updates / security patches etc.. from" properties.
Now if they sotred that out then maybe you wouldn't need each distro to build there RPM's and each RPM to be so huge an bloaty (especially when you take deps into account!!)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I agree, without signed packages and verification this could turn into quite a security breach.
Installing unknown binaries from a random source is BAD
I peaked at 620K BYTES per sec on my cable modem!
:)
:)
Nearly 5 megbits per sec! Yahoo!
This program ROCKS!
And thank you Cablevision!
After it completes downloading it leaves up the window with a "finnish" button and keeps uploading to other people. Just leave it up while you watch the movie and you improve other people's download speeds
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Files are split up into pieces and published over a lot of hosts, and when you download something you query the nodes closest to you. Should they not have the file but notice that a particular block is in high demand they contact other nodes and get that block so that data that's in high demand is moved to where the demand is.
It looks quite interesting. There is a win32 package availible for download that's functional but not good, and it's quite simple to get it from the cvs and compile it for your favorite platform.
I think there is a new release in the near future.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
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.
Who said it had to be large sums of money?
All Pubsoft is offering is to handle some issues and concernes that come
up in regards to dealing with donations to sponsor OSI compliant work. Like
how do you know the developer does the work they are paid for...etc..
The follow is such a situation where the "how" to make this happen hasn't
been figured out (should the developer be offered the 550 Euro).
But here is the solution with PubSoft!!
BTW: this is NOT me though I have offered some. AROS is an Open Source Amiga Clone
project that is almost at the 80% done mark. But it's intended to be better than
AmigaOS, and portable. See AROS @ Sourceforge
I have two months of free time this summer, which I would love to spend
on coding for AROS or AWeb Open Source. The problem is that I have to pay
my bills, and therefore I would need to get some temporary job. This of
course means there would be very little time to code on those projects...
The solution to this would be if someone (or some group of people) were
willing to sponsor me for coding on AROS or AWeb one month or two. I don't
ask for much money, just enough to pay my bills and to buy food. For that
I would code 60 hours / week, that is more than fulltime. In total, this
would mean around 240 hours of work going into AROS or AWeb in a month,
to improve any part you (the sponsor) wants me to.
You can find more information at:
AROS or AWeb Sponsoring
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
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
He founded Cygnus, which was the leading
free software developer until they were
bought by RedHat for $600 million. I doubt
Gilmore needs a job now.
They ought to use it as a chance to unify packages across all distributions while they're at it.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
The Public Software Fund would be happy to accept funding for any BSD project. Write a check!
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Not necessarily.
Let's say that your ".torrent" control file (which you download through traditional means) contains a md5sum for the entire file -- and perhaps another for the list of block sums (or that could be in the file directly). Your downloads are thus checked, and no network corruption can occur.
I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that BitTorrent does some form of verification not entirely unlike what I mention here.
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.
If you create a "work of art", have it appraised by an expert, print it on paper, and donate it to a non-profit organization. That org can issue you a tax deduction.
Tax Deductions are worth n+n^2 face value where n is your income tax rate. Say you were at the 50% rate - the Tax Deduction you receive for your artistic contribution to AmigaOS would be 75% of the Appraised Value. I doubt many programmers get 75% of the selling price of their software - so it's really a generous deal.
See IRS Document 561 for official details on donating "Works of Art".
Its true the document doesn't break down "Works of Art" into Books, vs Photographs, vs Original Van Gough vs, Compiled works of highly mathmatical precision, but Art is a big tent, and Software is as like art as anything else.
IANAL/CPA But what an easy place to find the money you need to complete that OS! And We the People will both benefit and pay.
AIK
Putting safeguards in the .torrent file is entirely effective as far as one understands its goal -- which is to say, making downloads as secure as they would be via a traditional (non-P2P) download of the whole file. Presuming presence of the abovementioned safeguards, Corruptability of the .torrent file in a BitTorrent-based distribution system is effectively equivalent to corruption of the entire download in another system -- they have the same risks, same difficulty levels, &c. If downloading the file via traditional HTTP is considered an acceptable risk, so must be a similar BitTorrent-based download.
.torrent file that downloads their installer from, they wouldn't check where they get their installer from otherwise; the risks are equivalent.
That is to say: If people don't check where they get the
You can already do this. Assign your copyright to the Free Software Foundation. Take the assignation contract and use it as a receipt. The only trick is coming up with a valuation for the software that the IRS will believe. As long as it's a plausible valuation, the IRS won't assess penalties if you get audited. They'll just hit you with interest charges.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist