Hi
Harbynger and welcome aboard!
You have a nice site with a lot of informed discussion going on, congratulations for the good work! It is always encouraging to see p2p users organizing themselves into these well-informed subcommunities that have a life and continuity of their own whatever the venture capital guys decide to do with their commercial applications.
This has been a great thread and I have followed the smart contributions of
Spikologia (
) and others with great interest. KazaaLite in itself is a wonderful countermove against Kazaa's disgusting spyware policy. I feel no sympathy for Kazaa/Sharman and would love to see the entire network taken out of their hands under community control.
However, as
colinmacc pointed out, the prospects and potential gains of such a project are questionable. At best one could hope to form a spyware-resistant subnet inside a larger network that Kazaa controls and profits from. Doing this with a hacked client whose inner workings are not thoroughly known is not an attractive idea. To make the client even reasonably safe and robust all automatic software upgrade functions plus all hardwired connectivity to Kazaa-controlled servers should be neutered from it. This would still just provide the protection for the subnet itself; it would remain in the hands of Kazaa whether to allow the client to connect to the main network under its rule.
Assuming that the above safety problems could be handled and that Kazaa would not quickly kick the client out (which is a lot to assume) we would still be left with a modest client with no bug fixes, no development, no future. And that is a real bummer. The p2p engine has been the only good part in the FastTrack clients (providing good file transfer and connectivity mechanisms) but otherwise the clients have been bloated, buggy and resource-hungry, in other words typical beta software under development. The client would dearly need better bandwidth/queue controls, a decent chat window and working hotlists, not to mention the obvious scalability issues (limited search visibility). In the present situation I would not hold my breath to see any client development done by Kazaa (besides bundling even more spyware that is) - and with a hacked client there would be no hope of development at all.
Much the same has happened with FastTrack that happened with Napster: when the network become #1 brand and the center of gravity for file sharing the client development was effectively stopped and whatever communication there had been between the companies and the users came to a halt. The focus is on money, control, legal issues etc. - not the best of environments to do long-term software devopment and to work on customer satisfaction.
- tg
