On Monday 11 October 2004 11:45 am, Frank Wiles wrote:
What I'm saying is that while Bittorrent is by definition P2P, the others you listed are not.
How do you define P2P? It means Peer to peer, implies transferring files from one system to a similarly used system, usually Personal Computer to Personal Computer. All of the methods we've discussed here can be used for that.
The only special things about bittorrent are that it's been optimized to transfer files that seem to be particularly large compared to the current capacity of the systems involved. Having seen software and file sizes evolve from primitive systems where 64 Kilobytes was a lot of space and 54 baud was fast, I can assure you that bittorrent is only an incremental step up from something like zmodem, which also treated a "large" file transfer as individual packets in order to optimize the stream.
It's not that I don't "get" the distinction that places systems like bittorrent or napster into a special, new category of file sharing, it's that I think the distinction is entirely bogus.
FIDOnet saw some similar accusations in it's day - mainly that it was used for distributing pirated software. Sure, it was one method of distribution, but that was not it's purpose, and there was nothing particular about FIDOnet itself that caused people to pirate software.
Legislating against innovations in software is one of the stupidest things you can do. It's not going to solve anybody's problems, and it's not going to prevent anything except casual use by the techonoligically naieve.