Peer to Peer: Collaboration and Sharing over the Internet

Visions of Sugarplum

As the recent hype about p2p as the solution to all problems faded in late 2001, along with many of the companies most vocal about this promise, we see a residue of practical solutions out there, hard at work or in the process of being deployed.

Despite the controversy, the single-source problem, the uncertainties about security and liabilities, many companies continue to pursue, sometimes aggressively, a deployment plan for p2p of one nature or another. Efficiency, better profit, better customer relations, staking out a future market—all are powerful motivations to take the risk, and their common element is some vision of revenue. Another, perhaps larger group is pursuing the open source implementations and further developing ...