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The Uncertain Future of BitTorrent
javipas writes "The people behind the popular BitTorrent tracker are working on a new version of the BitTorrent protocol that could become the successor to the current one, maintained by BitTorrent Inc. The company founded by Bram Cohen — original author of this protocol — now has decided to close the source for several new features in the BitTorrent protocol, and this "gives them too much power and influence". The new file format would be called .p2p, and would maintain backwards compatibility with current .torrent files."
You can give OSS to the people, but you can't take it back!!
Perhaps that's one of the biggest reasons people should think long and hard about attempting leverage open source to gain popularity and a user base. There's that possibility of the user base forking your work and taking it over if they don't like the direction you're going... and that's exactly what I predict will happen with BitTorrent. And while they're at it, they'll probably go ahead and build into it some anonymity protection.
Anyway, all p2p is based on innovation. Just look at history: Kazaa, napster, eDonkey and thousands of others. Protocols tend to disappear and being replaced by better and more sophisticated ones. Or they just get extensions like eMules Kademlia.
I think we should be happy that somebody's thinking about something new instead just relaying on something that's good but not optimal. Especially now with current climate of litigations and general problems (traffic shaping, etc) with BitTorrent it's time for something more resilient and anonymous.
Just my 2p.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
There are some very interesting technologies that can be applied to a new .p2p format while remaining backward-compatible with .torrent files. Such as auto-regeneration of almost-complete torrents via in-file redundancy (small size increase, massive benefit), the possibility of onion routing and obfuscation, new uploading algorithms, that sort of thing.
.torrent specifications -- the old, open one and the new, partially-closed one -- why not go whole hog and fork the thing all to hell? An application should be able to easily handle both.
And honestly, if Bittorrent closes some of the protocol, the features either going to be ignored or reverse engineered. In which case there's already 2 different
[ think ]
After MPAA got Bram Cohen and the UTorrent guy on their pockets, it was a matter of time until they tried to pull such stunts. My bet is that they will try to close a "hole" in the protocol, the impossibility to create a truly private swarm, one where only authorized peers could connect, regardless of the desire of the peers themselves to share the information about the other peers (DHT style). That's the wet dream of people selling content, they could sell access to their content using the bittorrent protocol and nobody would be able to join the swarm without paying.
But there is nothing there people should be afraid., as everybody knows, real innovation on the P2P scene occurs when the interested parts (the filesharers, not necessarily illegal ones) are the real force behind the development, as PEX (protocol encryption) came to prove, now that the cat is out of the sack, there is not a lot of things that Mr. Cohen can do.
By keeping the source closed, he is in fact assuming all responsibility for the actions of his code. If his code allows something bad to happen, we can say with certainty that it's all his fault.
You can't take the sky from me...