November 01, 2001
I like peer-to-peer. The architecture appeals to me, I'm excited about a lot of the P2P apps that are out there...it's just plain fun and exciting stuff, especially once you peel away all the layers of marketing hype. I'm perversely delighted at how P2P is sneaking into the office under IT departments' noses. However at the same time, working within an IT department -- in an academic environment, no less -- I see the sort of problems that P2P filesharing apps can pose: bandwidth and legal issues, to start with. When an entire campus's bandwidth is sucked up by a student trafficking in porn or illegal MP3s, well it's a problem. For the most part, I tend to skirt around the issue; I rarely have to deal with it directly (I'm a web guy, not a WAN guy), and anyway part of me is going "yay P2P!" I mean, that student's probably going to suck up bandwidth regardless of architecture, right?
Andy Oram, editor of O'Reilly's Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, recently gave a speech to about Peer-to-Peer for Academia, in which he tries to downplay the negative aspects of P2P and encourages academia to experiment with P2P to take advantage of what it has to offer. Worth a read.
