Wired on the 'Breakup' of Distributed.net

binarydreams writes "Wired News has a pretty good article about Adam Beberg leaving Distributed.net. It provides more details about the disparate goals of Beberg and Distributed. Provides much of the background lacking in the two emails sent to the distributed announce list. "

Comments

A bit more information...

[Nugget94M]

I apologize for any perceived vagueness in the original announcment from distributed.net. We all basically felt that a broad and more general treatment of the issue was the most appropriate tack to take in the initial announcement. It was very important to us to ensure that people realize that this divergance was amicable, friendly, and desired by all parties. To dwell too much on the specifics of the difference of opinion might be misinterpreted as drawing lines in the sand or bashing.

While the actual issues are simple, they are fundamental; the difference of opinion between Adam and distributed.net is more related to development philosophies than it is to our respective visions. We are both still striving towards a next-generation, general purpose distributed computing protocol and implementation.

Adam sees Cosm as very much his personal invention, and he wants to see his vision implemented. We are more interested in exploring in the direction of a more open development environment. Trying to co-mingle those two philosophies was difficult and ultimately damaging to the organization.

Open-source is the holy grail of distributed computing and is arguably the single greatest task lying ahead of us. It also makes sense for this task to be the first we tackle as we move forward.
I would say that it is by far the most compelling and desirable goal we've laid out.

The move from our sub-optimal "security through obscurity" model (which was never intended to last as long as it has) to an open source model is not really an issue of just slapping on some "extra security", however. The concept of trusting work performed by untrusted code is the sticky-wicket of distributed computing. Zero-Knowledge Proofs, as treated to date, don't entirely address the issue in a compelling and aesthetic manner.

I'm not sure anyone knows quite the best way to approach this problem, and it is our hope that by encouraging discourse and open development we can, as a group, hone in on the most appropriate choice for our various applications.

Believe me, though, when I tell you not to read anything at all into the fact that we have been closed source to date. This does not imply any loyalty to closed-source or closed development. We are all very committed to solving this dilemma and we always have been.

It has been very difficult for distributed.net, as an entity, to agree upon and convey a common and compelling focus when internally this was not the case. Unfortunately, much of our energy lately has been spent trying to reconcile two distinct and at-odds design philosophies.

Ultimately we all decided that it was no longer prudent to try to come to an agreement and thus the decision followed that Adam and distributed.net should each proceed in their own desired direction.

On a technology front, distributed.net's goals are to utilize a truly open development environment to develop the next generation of distributed computing client and server. We are committed to moving our codebase beyond the ultimately indefensible closed-source model and to an open source codebase. Not open implementation, but truly open development. distributed.net needs to begin living up to its name and distributing not only our client base but our brain trust as well.

On an organizational front, our goals are unchanged. We seek to be the central standard for distributed computing. To continue to grow exponentially and expose as many people as possible to the concept of distributed computing and encourage them to become involved in the group. We wish to be the bar against which all distributed computing efforts are
compared.

Cosm Information

[Duncan3]

Unlike what the Wired article was looking for, there was no internal conflict that led to the breakup.

It was simply a matter that Cosm and myself have been headed one way, and others in distributed.net want to head another. So we parted ways. It was the Best option for Cosm and distributed.net both.

My goals since long ago have been to build a general purpose architecture for large scale distributed computing. A system that will allow projects all over the world to get done, while maintaining security and data integrity. That is what Cosm is.

All the Cosm information that's available is at http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/cosm/ and more is going up every day.

As has always been the plan, Cosm source will be public, both for development reasons, and security/trust issues. This is due to happen in a few more days (May 1), but could not happen until a design and framework were available to guide the code. A lot of very tough problems have had to be solved during that process. And now it's time to make Phase 1 happen.