O'Reilly Network Weekly
Open Source Roundtable
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O'Reilly's Peer-to-Peer Summit
09/22/2000

Has Napster's notorious success helped or hindered the prospects for peer-to-peer computing? Helped, overwhelmingly, says Tim O'Reilly, who hosted a summit on peer-to-peer computing this past Monday, September 18, 2000. The summit brought together people from traditional computing companies like Microsoft, Intel, and IBM, as well as folks from new P2P projects like Gnutella, Freenet, and Jabber. We talked to Tim and Byte.com columnist Jon Udell about the summit and what applications there are for peer-to-peer beyond the popular Napster service.

Listen to this discussion (16:15 mins, 3.8 MB):

Read the transcript.

Tim O'Reilly Publisher & CEO O'Reilly & Associates "One way I like to characterize [peer-to-peer] is, if you think of instant messaging as a paradigmatic application, instant messaging asks the question, 'Are you there? Do you want to chat?' Napster asks the question, 'Do you have this MP3 file?' Jini asks the question, 'Are you a printer, and do you know how to do my file?'

Jon Udell Columnist Byte.com "I guess if I have any concerns about the effect of Napster, it's that it has imprinted this idea of specifically file sharing so forcefully on a lot of people right now, it may not be obvious what some of the other kinds of applications are -- and there are many."