Dr. Dobb's Journal January 2001
Michael Swaine editor-at-large mswaine@cruzio.com
You don't have to play me backwards
To get the meaning of my verse.
—Joan Baez
Congratulations are in order to Bruce P. Holmen, who cracked the uncrackable — or simply unreadable — puzzle that appeared in this column in October under a relevant title "Acrophilia," if I recall correctly. Fine cracking, Bruce. CAI OTB PH WCTU OSU PTA ITC IO UART AI IRC FCB.
Elsewhere in this issue, I make the outrageous claim that the most important technological advance in the past 25 years is Gnutella, a piece of software that appears to have become unworkable before it ever worked. You may be wondering what I was drinking when I made that assessment, and I intend to tell you now. Or not that, exactly. I mean, I don't intend to tell you what I was drinking so much as what I was thinking.
When it was first reported that the alphanumeric acronym (again with the acronyms?) "MP3" was being typed into search engines more often than the word "sex," it was clear to the dullest intellect that something was up. At least two conclusions were inescapable — 1: The music industry was in trouble, and 2: Somebody could make a lot of money helping people find MP3 files.
Those two logical conclusions led to two equally logical developments — 1: The launch of Napster, and 2: The music industry's relentless drive to shut it down.
Napster made it easy for people to share music. You log onto the Napster site and add to its master database the list of songs that you are willing to share; then when you want to find a song that you don't have, you do a Napster search, downloading it directly from a user who offered to share it. For free.
To the music industry, it was a haven for pirates. As the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) intensified its legal attack on Napster, and later when a court sided with the RIAA, supporters of the music-sharing service took consolation in one thought: No matter what happens, there's always Gnutella.
Gnutella. The end run around all legal challenges to Internet-based music sharing. Gnutella removed from the Napster model any central, sueable party. Gnutella, created as a project at AOL of all places, took Napster into distributed, peer-to-peer territory.
Almost immediately, problems began to appear, like the cracks in the Mac Cube. (Yes, I know they're not really cracks, but the Mac Cube crack meme is a powerful one. Who am I to challenge it with mere facts?) Gnutella is slow, Gnutella is buggy, the community of developers behind Gnutella is slow and buggy, the Gnutella model is inherently flawed (with no central control, there will be too many takers, not enough givers), it doesn't scale, it violates basic design principles of the Internet (the machines that host the data need to be connected 24/7). Writers over at CNET have labeled peer-to-peer technology like Gnutella socialism and predict that it is doomed to be swallowed up by the forces of capitalism.
Well, I think they're wrong. Or rather, I think that independent systems like Gnutella (yes, perhaps better designed than Gnutella) will persist whether they are also coopted somehow by commercial interests. Gnutella is just the proof of a concept.
I don't mean a technical concept or a business concept, but rather a social concept. Peer-to-peer is inherent in the Internet itself. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the Internet is not even now primarily a commercial marketplace. It's the infrastructure on which commercial marketplaces, among other things, can be built. And some of those other things are more interesting than all the noise about e-commerce.
Finally, a note to those of you who read magazines backwards, starting on the last page: Could you, just this month, read the rest of the issue before you read this column? The Gnutella essay will make more sense that way. Thanks.