Re: FoRK This Action!! (P2P's Dark Side)

From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Fri Mar 02 2001 - 11:12:52 PST


Adam Beberg speweth:

> In other words, capitalism and P2P do not mix
> because P2P is a socialist construct, just like open source.
>

BTW, the above, classic Beberg-style, is one of the most ridiculous leaps of
analysis I've ever heard. Here're two counters.

Assume a fully P2P file-sharing facility. No privileged "servers." No way for
anyone to make money, right? Wrong. I've got 50GB of files I'd like to store,
but only 5GB of storage. You --- an individual, or whatever --- happen to have
500GB of storage. You're willing to let me use some of your space for some
$amount / time period. Voila! Capitalism, facilitated by p2p technology.

Similarly with open source. I've got this free software I'll give you, say a
display server. What's that, it doesn't support your video card? You can fix
that yourself, or I'll be happy to do it for you with quality guarantees and
support for $amount. Voila! Capitalism. Facilitated by p2p technology.

Folks, p2p is NOT a market, it's NOT a business model, it's a *freakin'*
communication pattern, just like push was. It's not even a technology in its
own right: it's merely an enabler. It's just a generalization of the
client-server pattern; where in client-server only one side can initiate
requests and the other respond to them, in p2p any component can do either.

I'm so sick of hearing about p2p I could puke. Folks! No! Let's not turn p2p
into a bad word!

Get over it, Beberg.

jb

PS - while we're at it, HTTP needs *fewer* methods, not more; it's universal
RPC; you can do anything you want with any synchronous request-response
protocol; and WebDAV sucks. So there. ;-)



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:13:18 PDT