BitTorrent question

[Frank Wiles]

On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 11:20:21 -0500
Gerald Combs <gerald at ethereal.com> wrote:

> 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.

  Every project of any size relies on mirrors.  What I meant by afford 
  was "what they are currently doing works", not that they were able to
  support all of their bandwidth costs financially.  
 
> 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.
> 

  I think it's more of a marketshare deal.  Not everyone has a BT
  client or is familiar/comfortable with it.  Everyone who is going to
  download a open source project can use a browser and most likely an
  FTP client. 

  That and the "what we are currently doing works" so let's not put
  resources toward setting up a BT feed when that time could be better
  spent setting up another solid mirror, coding, documentation, etc. 

 ---------------------------------
   Frank Wiles <frank at wiles.org>
   http://www.wiles.org
 ---------------------------------