[DMCA-Activists] Gonze: WASTE is not Grokster

[Seth Johnson]

> http://openp2p.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/3253


WASTE is P2P IM

by Lucas Gonze
May. 31, 2003


WASTE competes with AIM, not Kazaa.

The early reaction to WASTE is that it's yet another filesharing tool, and
that's wrong in a way that matters.

The reason that WASTE is not a filesharing tool is that it doesn't support
searching. Under the hood, Kazaa et al are nothing but search engines, while
WASTE clusters are too small for search. A real cluster would be 5-10
people, not even the 50 given by developers as the maximum size, and at that
scale searching is pointless.

WASTE is a tool for chat and IRC, with no more or less suport for
filesharing than AIM. Indeed, this is a very good reason for AOL to come
down hard on the project. AOL's strategic leverage is that it has the
largest base of instant messaging users, and hence is the easiest way to
reach somebody over instant messaging. WASTE not only ignores the AOL
Instant Messenger namespace, it sets up a new namespace, and the
decentralized nature of that namespace means that no provider -- not Jabber,
not MSN/Passport, not even AOL/Nullsoft -- can get a strategic edge. If the
WASTE namespace were to to take off, the new mega-namespace established by
the Microsoft/AOL truce would be obsolete.

WASTE is scorched earth for AIM.

As with a lot of P2P, WASTE represents scorched earth for companies that
want to own a namespace. If you want to use centralized IM, you have to pass
ownership of your IM identity to a service provider like AIM or Passport.
But if you don't want to talk to everybody in the world, just the few that
you actually know, and the overhead to whitelist your friends is low
relative to the length of time that you'll stay in contact with them,
there's no reason for identity service providers. In WASTE, nobody owns your
identity but you.

WASTE also bypasses much of the need for presence providers to interconnect
people behind firewalls. If any member of a WASTE cluster is not behind a
firewall, messages are passed through that node. In my WASTE cluster, for
example, there has always been at least one node not behind a firewall.
There has always been at least one broadband node, and there's no incentive
to be a free rider, since clusters are formed around meatspace
relationships. Most people are happy to help out their friends, as long as
it isn't too much of an inconvenience.

WASTE is nothing new.

Gnutella was fundamentally new in that it gave slacker developers a way into
autonomous networks, which were ivory tower stuff at the time. WASTE
introduces no new ideas -- everything in it has been shipped already in
Groove, and WASTE is missing a lot of things that Groove has.

The only thing new about WASTE is that it works. Groove is too bloated for
normal use. If you need Groove's quality of service, security, and
replication, there is no competition. If you don't need all that you're
better off with WASTE. Fair enough: Groove is for enterprise workgroups,
WASTE is for friendnets. WASTE is worse. Which is better.

TODO

There are two big things that could be improved.


It's not worse enough. There's still a bunch of junk that can be factored
out -- we'll know it can get no smaller when there's a Javascript version.
The Unix console code doesn't have a bunch of functionality, but it works,
and console versions imply good things about simplicity. Still, there are
console versions of SOAP, so that by itself doesn't prove anything. 
Poor support for transitive relationships. You automatically get a
connection to a friend of a friend, and after that, friends-of-friends are
treated the same as friends themselves. That's not good enough. There needs
to be a way to keep introducers in the middle, so that names and bytes
continue to be vouched for and guaranteed by the introducer. 

Lucas Gonze is the former Cofounder and CEO of WorldOS Corp., a
decentralized infrastructure provider, and an industry expert on the
technical infrastructure requirements of Instant Messaging. 


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