Zooko writes:
I am about to accept an exciting job that will preclude me from contributing to open source projects in the distributed file-system space.
I will miss the Mnet project! Good luck without me!
Is there a network currently running? At one time, I had 5 gig of Mnet blockstore, but when months went by with no metatracking, and apparently, no running network, I grew bored and rm'ed it.
I'm writing the following as a record of the most advanced design that I have thought of for Mnet.
[Clippage]] Yes, well. My thoughts on this, and other distributed filesystems, are as follows. We have the following useful technologies. Swarmed downloads, erasure coding, distributed filesystem with global namespace, encryption, routing, accounting, and search. We have various systems which have implemented a various subsets of these features, with varying degrees of efficiency. The killer technology amongst all these is obviously swarmed downloading, which, efficiently implemented in Bittorrent, currently accounts for a third of network bandwidth. The two systems which implement the most of the above technologies, Mnet and Freenet, while theoretically lovely, have at most a niche following, and are cumbersome to set up and use, with frequent "issues" in their protocols and codebase. Now, I think we can all agree that it would be lovely to have a distributed filesystem, with a global namespace, that anyone can put stuff in, and take stuff out of, which guarantees anonymity for both producers and consumers of content, swarms downloads, has an redundant distributed encrypted backing store that lasts forever, is easily and quickly searched, can be instantly set up by anyone who wishes to use it, never breaks, and starves users who unreasonably leech large amounts of resources without reciprocating. BUT, given that bittorrent is a wild success, which people ACTUALLY USE, would it not make more sense to create such a system by augmenting bittorrent with the technologies it presently lacks, than by continuing development on other systems, many of them bloated and buggy, which have been around for years without managing to be made to work well, or attracting large numbers of happy and satisfied customers? If you had a thousand hours of genius programmer time, would you spend it embracing and extending Bittorrent, or shoveling through the indecipherable bowels of legacy Mnet and Freenet code? I think Mnet and Freenet were wonderful testbeds, which taught us all a lot about what does and doesn't work in grandiose P2P schemes. But Bittorrent is where the users are, and software without users is like network television programming without viewers. -- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"