Actually, I think both comments are partially on the mark, and partially off the mark. We HAVE had peer-to-peer applications, of various sorts, for years. USENET comes to mind (I can't think of very much that any centralized social networks do that USENET news wasn't doing years ago. And at one point, someone did a very nice implementation of USENET on top of a distributed hash table). The failure of USENET has a lot more do to with not finding a viable solution to spam than anything else. Currently, distributed CVS systems (notably GIT) are a peer-to-peer application that's very successful. And then there's torrent. Re. Wikipedia and Linux: Both build on rather rich ecosystems of prior art, and development communities. Wikis came first, in various flavors, wikipedia. The world wide web virtual library predated wikipedia by decades. It took a lot of experimentation, plus vision and drive before wikipedia coalesced. Linux builds on the legacy of Unix and lets not forget all the stuff done by Stallman and the FSF (e.g, all the gnu tools and gnu userspace without which Linux would be useless). The problem with Poor Richard's proposal is severalfold: 1. lack of specificity - "let's build a P2P application suite" is a pretty content free statement - the PeerPoint "specification" really isn't anything resembling much of a specification 2. lack of vision - Ted Nelson's "Dream Machine's" book and Xanadu concept never really led to any widely used code, but they sure inspired a lot of people - precisely because Nelson laid out a vision of new capabilities -- other people went on to implement some of those ideas 3. lack of understanding about how technology evolves - open source or not - it involves an ecosystem and a process of incremental development, punctuated by flashes of insight 4. lack of anything motivating - is there really that much dissatisfaction with FaceBook? I mean, an awful lot of people use it, and there are alternatives for old reprobates like me who find FaceBook pretty insipid and useless (except for keeping track of my kid). For real work, email lists have been around an awfully long time, and don't seem to be going away anytime soon. The folks who REALLY worry about privacy/secrecy are using VPNs, encryption, darknets, etc. "Let's build an application suite" is a mantra that leads to things like MS Office. "Let's build an open source application suite" leads to OpenOffice and LibreOffice - which are essentially not-as-good imitations of MS Office. I simply don't see anything in the PeerPoint proposal that goes beyond "let's do x, y, and z, but let's do it peer-to-peer." Now if Poor Richard were to start developing stuff, that actually did useful and interesting things, I expect it would attract a community. But just saying "I think people should do <this>," where <this> is generally uninspired and uninteresting, is not a recipe for anything. Paul Hughes wrote:

Mark,

Wikipedia and Linux are two prime examples of substantive creations greater than Poor Richard's proposal that were done almost entirely by volunteers with no desire for compensation other than the joy of creating something awesome.

I believe the time is ripe for PeerPoint or something equivalent. In fact it's long overdue. Because of the growing dissatisfaction with Facebook, and efforts to control and censor the net, there are more people wanting, and willing to build something like this than ever before.

Paul

On Jun 18, 2012, at 20:15, Mark Janssen-Rosenbluth wrote:

...

Richard, there is very little such application suites on the "drawing board" because we're way ahead of you. These conversations have been going on for over a decade. You're excited to get started, so you start afresh, but many of us have heard it all before. That there isn't something more by now is a difficult fact to explain. But probably the biggest reason is that after the litigation over p2p file-sharing and such, no one (with financial resources or political clout) has taken the "leap of faith" to "get it done". Such a comprehensive and radical project isn't that far from the process that created the protocols of the whole Internet to begin with... and you know how many years and millions that took....

So, if you want this to happen, I suggest you solve the political and/or financing problem.... don't go rei-inventing the wheel.

mark j

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