March 7, 2001

12:55 AM

Is this another lifeline for Napster? Would going offshore with the servers really make any difference?
posted by ecvgi (2 comments total)

Jeez. Napster's dead, the whole principle behind it is dead. You don't need these servers, a distributed network protocol like Gnutella works a whole lot better. The best: there's no one to sue!
posted by frog at 2:21 AM on March 7, 2001

You don't need these servers, a distributed network protocol like Gnutella works a whole lot better.

In theory, yes. In practice, no. (Gnutella's been unusable since the first fears of a Napster shutdown.) Its usefulness is directly proportionate to the bandwidth of the narrowest pipe on the network. The same applies to Freenet, which rivals .NET for the amount of uninformed hype that's been written about it. It just doesn't scale.

Have you even tried to use Gnutella recently?

Clay Shirky said it at the O'Reilly P2P conference: Napster is distributed enough. The only reason for distributing metadata is to evade the lawyers, and even then, a smarter solution is to retain the Napster-esque centralisation of metadata servers, but use a distributed protocol to access those servers. That way you reduce the bandwidth requirements for the element most susceptible to bottlenecks.
posted by holgate at 5:34 AM on March 7, 2001