BitTorrent for Content Providers

snuvlorgin writes "ibiblio.org has entered the fray, launching an enhanced BitTorrent site. Among the torrent offerings (all legal) are Linux kernels, distros, Project Gutenberg texts, and the ibiblio Speaker Series, which includes videos of talks by Larry Lessig, Robin Miller, and Dan Gillmor. ibiblio developed and open sourced the Osprey and Permaseed software to make BitTorrent seeding reliable, persistent, and suitable for large-scale content providers. Yes, you can find these torrents later."

Comments

Let's see.

[Poromenos1]

Hopefully with this companies will start to use BT as an alternative to http/ftp. The downside is that you have to have a client, but I bet that browsers will have integrated BT support soon (the new Opera does, FF has a plugin). And the savings for the server range from a LOT to none, and even none can't hurt, since if nothing else you at least have a great download client able to resume downloads, download huge files, etc.

Re:Let's see.

[aywwts4]

Shut your face, as someone who is actually still stuck on dialup I find your comments offensive and insensitive; you know full well on your dialup days the downloads you attempt would have taken weeks. And even try to liken it to our suffering when you see speeds in the lower half of a hundred K that might take a couple of hours. For Shame Good sir, For Shame.

(Yeah, I'm planning on suing the government and AT&T for retributions for the hardships and suffering our modem bound people have had to endure.)


Seriously though, the answer to the rare file dilemma is that the website that is hosting the torrents needs to have a server running Bittorent and all the files with intelligent prioritizing of the worst seeded files. So when there are other people to take the load the website can outsource it, when its rare the website will have to share the burden like it would have had to via http anyways.

Re:Peachy

[tacarat]

Just in case Peachy's discouraged anyone from trying to submit their homebrew distrobution to Ibiblio.

From Ibiblio.org
---------------
Contributing to ibiblio.org
If you are interested in becoming an ibiblio.org contributor:

      1. Read the Collection Criteria to see if your interest will be served by working with us
      2. Check out the services we offer contributors to see if we have what you need.
      3. Hint: very few, if any, proprietary services will be provided, but many open source solutions are, can or will be offered on request.
      4. Drop a note to help@ibiblio.org telling us:

        * What your project will be
        * What services you might wish to use
        * How to contact you by phone (so we can work out any details and passwords)
        * Anything else you think might be helpful
---------------

One of the main things to be considered is keeping things up to date and making some sort of contribution to the public. It (should) be a given that the bigger distros will be properly maintained, as a good homebrew distro should, but a homebrew which is only a minor modification to an existing distro may not make the cut. If you've got a great modification, maybe you should see if it's more practical to distribute the modified packages instead of an entire distro.

Science Content and Torrent

[kkamrani]

I would like to see the scientific journals, especially The Public Library of Science (PLoS) http://www.plos.org/ start distributing their montly publications over Bit Torrent. There have been occasions of downloading their 150mb journals where there servers and bandwidth were clearly overwhelmed. It would, in my opnion, be a great front to publicize excellent and FREE scientific articles as well as popularize and legitmize bit torrent as a cost effective and fast way to distribute content.