On Feb 25, 2007, at 6:50 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
What your talking about only works if you have a large group of
FreeBSD volunteers that are willing to run the torrent servers.
Let's assume that only 0.01% of any population group would step up
to the plate to offer a torrent server. Well I can see a Linux
torrent network working because Linux has an order of magnitude
greater number of users than FreeBSD. But I think you would find
it impossible to recruit something like 1000 FreeBSD users to step
up to the plate and offer a torrent server. The population numbers
just aren't there.
I've never used a file sharing system, so my understanding of things
is limited, but that won't stop me from voicing opinions.
As far as I understand how these things work, if you join a file
sharing network for download, you are 95% of the way to setting
yourself up as a "server". Remember, it isn't so much as a client/
server set-up as a peer-to-peer setup. There may be plenty of BSD
users who already use torrents for other things, and so could easily
add sharing of the ISOs. So the participation rate might be
substantially larger than 0.01%.
Worse, the initial people that offer the server are going to get
the brunt of the load and you can't give them any guarentee that
your going to be able to recruit future torrent servers to lessen
the work on them.
The way this sort of problem is generally solved is to have people
make commitments of the form
I will do X if at least N other people commit to doing X.
Someone has to keep track of those commitments (I'm *not*
volunteering) but there is this group participation protocol that has
been used by various volunteer organizations with some success.
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
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