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P2P Content Delivery for Open Source

Posted by timothy on from the sounds-smart dept.

Orasis writes "The Open Content Network is a collaborative effort to help deliver open source, public domain, and Creative Commons-licensed content using peer-to-peer technology. The network is essentially a huge 'virtual web server' that links together thousands of computers for the purpose of helping out over-burdened/slashdotted web sites. Any existing mirror or web site can easily join the OCN by tweaking the HTML on their site."

4 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Bittorrent by pacc · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's open source peer-to-peer and handles exactly the problem of distributed serving.

    1. Re:Bittorrent by c_ollier · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's open source peer-to-peer and handles exactly the problem of distributed serving.

      Yes, BT is exactly this. A good site about BT : http://smiler.no-ip.org/BT/info.php

      I don't see much difference between BT and OCN, by the way. Or am I missing something ?

  2. Places like FilePlanet... by Levine · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...have been doing this for awhile now. I've seen download sites giving you the option of grabbing game demos from their site or through some small P2P client that they offer, which snags parts of the file from other users and combines them all on your end.

    This technology's out there, but it's nice to see it gaining some fairly widespread adoption.

    levine

  3. They need to be more descriptive. by stienman · · Score: 4, Informative

    I looked over the website and the site for the current client, and found only faint, inspecific references to what loading such a client does to your machine and internet connection.

    This is terrible.

    We complain when Gator is loaded as an 'add-on' to our system, yet we don't mind if we are not allowed to download some content without loading some P2P app which then uses our disk space and internet connection to serve others?

    They need to put up a specific message that says, in effect, "This download client will significantly speed up the process of obtaining this file. Once downloaded your computer will allow other people to download this same file, or portions of it, from your computer so they can gain the same speed benefit you will get. There is no security risk, and you can stop the client from letting others download this file by moving or deleting the file, or ending the client by doing x, y and z. If you wish to simply download the file normally without installing this client, click here - otherwise click 'OK'"

    Yes, we all understand what P2P means - we are donating part of our computer and network to the P2P network for as long as we are connected to the internet. But this is not common terminology - ask a non-computer expert who has spent hours downloading music from their favorite P2P app what the P2P app does, and all they know is that they can get "free" music with this cool program. They often have no idea that others are downloading music from their computer, etc.

    This may slow down adoption, but the reality is that the backlash that may come out against it is not worth the extra adoption it may gain without full and well-explained disclosure - as well as a method to download the file normally.

    -Adam