One program to connect to most P2Ps

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by napho
It seems like a great idea if they can pull it off. Others have tried and failed though.

"OpenP2P seeks to establish an Open Source *anonymous and secure* P2P network, combining the current large P2P networks, including Gnutella, eDonkey, FastTrack, OpenFT, OpenNap, WinMX, AudioGalaxy, Direct Connect, alt.binaries.*, FTPs, IRC, and websites."

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openp2p

Thanks napho for bringing OpenP2P up, it is certainly worth a look.

Besides the basic idea quoted above there is little information on the website about the project and its state; the same applies to the public sections of the message board. It might be a project with some coding momentum in it or just a discussion club. Anyway, let's evaluate the idea itself and see what it implies.

The first part of the idea - establishing an anonymous, secure and open-sourced network to link p2p users together over community borders - is sound and well justified. Such a metanetwork, being created and sustained by users and free of any commercial interests, would be a great safeguard for p2p communities against outside hostilities and unpredictable changes in the commercial services.

As for the piggybacking part of the idea things are not necessarily so straightforward. Open protocol networks - Gnutella, OpenFT, OpenNap - are natural easy targets but I wouldn't hold my breath to see any lasting success with the proprietary networks. The giFT developers tried for a while to adapt to the repeated FastTrack protocol changes until they gave up and wisely focused their efforts to developing an alternative protocol instead. WinMX has always kept WPNP's log-in mechanism centralized and is unlikely to welcome third party clients in any near future. There are also design, bandwidth and scaling considerations. Direct Connect for example would probably fit badly into an open environment - it is designed for exclusive small-group sharing and runs on very limited slots. OpenNap is also running out of slots, most popular networks being hard to even get in, not to talk about their limited browsing and slow server responses.

We also must ask: if somebody sees the trouble of writing a client that can establish secure peer connectivity and piggyback other networks why not to support direct filesharing too? That would be the obvious next step.

- tg