As a research project Freenet has been and continues to be very valuable.
Every serious P2P development project is valuable as it helps to spread p2p-related ideas and technical solutions to a growing population of developers - and Freenet has been one of the most interesting and inspiring projects around, especially in the issues of privacy.
As a filesharing network Freenet may never break through with its present architecture. Its basic idea of having all shared data distributed in encrypted form into people's computers is both alien and impractical to normal filesharers. Alien because people want to have full control over their personal sharing, and impractical as having abundant content in the network would require similarly abundant buffer space reserved for encrypted data. Nobody minds donating a few megabytes of HD space for encrypted storage should a p2p application need it, but to have gigabytes of inaccessible binary pulp on your HD does not sound like the way to go.
- tg
