Bittorrent

[Jonathan Hutchins]

A resent question here brings up something that's bugged me too.  

Bittorrent is a great concept.  It's community supported, and for files the 
size of installation iso's it's a better way to download.

So why hasn't it replaced ftp completely?

Because bittorrent doesn't work.

When it does work, it works great.  It works so well and it's such a great 
idea that people for whom it works often abandon conventional means of 
distributing files, leaving their projects completely in limbo if the 
torrents dry up, or if one of the many other overriding reasons bittorrent 
doesn't work should take them down.

I don't want to get into a language war here.  I know that there can be no 
growth without change.  Part of the problem with bittorrent is that it's 
written in python, and python is an evolving language, so depending on what 
platform you're on, you may or may not have access ot a version of python 
that will run bittorrent.  (I don't.)

Although bittorrent pierces firewalls pretty well, it's not clear that it does 
as well outbound as inbound.  This appears to stall the process in some 
cases, as you are expected to share your resources if you're going to 
participate in a torrent .

The other problem, and one that I think has probably been what kept me from 
persuing bittorrent further, is that there are a lot of bad links to bad 
torrents out there - streams that won't launch, won't connect, for whatever 
reason.

So the problem is that if you have a project that has "discovered" bittorrent, 
but has yet to discover all the potential problems it has, you end up with a 
project that's inaccessible to a large portion of it's potential audience.  
The standard OSS community response is to blame the users, and belittle their 
skills and knowledge because they can't get bittorrent to run.

If anybody's listening, I have another idea.  The traditional protocol for 
distributing software on the internet still works just fine.  For a 
bittorrent project, it makes a great backup, and ensures that future torrents 
can be launched, even if there's a problem that takes down the original 
links.

</rant>