BitTorrent question

[Gerald Combs]

Frank Wiles wrote:

>   Maybe I'm a weirdo, but if HTTP and FTP work and the projects can
>   afford the bandwidth why would they? Just another service they would
>   have to maintain. 

They _can't_ afford the bandwidth.  SourceForge and Gentoo in particular
rely heavily on mirrors.  I wouldn't be surprised if the bandwidth for
the other projects was donated or subsidized by a third party.

>   The main reason someone uses BitTorrent is to avoid having to pay for
>   all of the bandwidth costs associated with large projects.  There is
>   no other real reason to switch, other than being new/different/cool
>   which IMHO is a horrible reason.  
> 
>   Out of curiosity why would you want them to support BitTorrent? 

I don't neccessarily want them to, I just want to know why they aren't.
 If you could save bandwidth costs or avoid the hassle of administering
mirrors by setting up a BT feed, why wouldn't you?  From Ethereal's
perspective, doing this would be a no-brainer - even our
modest-in-comparison bandwidth requirements cost a fair amount of money
per month.  I'm just wondering why it isn't common practice.