Earlier this week, there was a post on the O'Reilly Radar which quoted Jon Udell's Infoworld article on "open infrastructure". I read both without comprehension.
Tim O'Reilly writes that developers should "create open source, perhaps P2P, infrastructure", so as not to give Google/Microsoft/Yahoo!/Amazon undue influence based on their economies of scale. (Jon calls Google, etc "galactic clusters". I like that!) And Jon presents P2P hosting as the logical next step:
We’ve already seen how open source software projects harness collective effort to produce quality results. We’re now seeing how open content projects such as Wikipedia do the same. Can open infrastructure be far behind?
Arguably it’s already here. Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, notes that if we regard the P2P file-sharing networks from a technical rather than a political/legal perspective, we observe the evolution of robust decentralized storage systems. These systems could well represent a bigger threat to Amazon’s metered disk in the cloud, S3, than any of Amazon’s galactic peers will.
Um, right. I mean, logistically speaking, how would someone implement P2P storage? Wouldn't it be a challenge to ensure the continued existence of data scattered across disk space over which you have no control? (Update: I found some info. See here.)
Today, though, I came across this C|Net article on the Electric Sheep. And I think I'm starting to understand how open infrastructure works.
The Electric Sheep is an open source screensaver that 30,000 people have installed on their computers. It uses these machines' collective processing power to render heavy duty psychedelic graphics.
It's sort of like SETI @ home (which uses Internet-connected computers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence), but better. Participants can interact with the project by voting for sheep designs (popular sheep "reproduce" to create related images), or submit their own sheep to the "gene pool". The author, Scott Draves, recently updated his software with built-in BitTorrent, so that users can download the latest sheep faster.
Speaking of BitTorrent, Techcrunch wrote about Red Swoosh earlier this month. It offers a P2P technology that lets users download and stream files from up to 30 predecessors. Because most of the data is pulled from peers rather than content providers' file servers, bandwidth savings can really add up.
And Om Malik wrote almost a year ago that in the near future, we might all have super cheap multi-gigabit connectivity. Not to mention umpteen-core processors and terabyes of disk space. In which case, P2P hosting would totally make sense. I'm still not sure how the logistics would work, but instead of the Googlezon Grid, maybe we'll end up with an open source grid.
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