-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On Mon, 3 Sep 2001, Steve Schear wrote:
>
> At 08:55 PM 9/3/2001 -0400, V. Alex Brennen wrote:
> >
> >I've tried to contact limewire about working with them on some
> >distributed resources coding concepts. I found them unreceptive.
> >They suck.
>
> Maybe you're suggestion was too far afield from their ambitions for
> LimeWire. Maybe they thought you were a jerk. Maybe... In any case Lime
> is getting great reviews from friends regarding easy of learning, use and
> flexibility.
>
> It seems that if a few of the technically competent want to raise this
> issue with them perhaps we should discuss this a bit to see if we can reach
> something of a consensus and then have on of the coders make contact with
> Steve Cho at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Trust me, they suck. Their product may be the best thing out there now,
but the open source client will be reasonably stable and usable soon
enough (especially if some people on this list contribute patches).
IIRC, I cc'd Steven Cho on the message I sent to Lime and the technical
contact address they provided on their web page. The message I sent
was basically an offer to implement MojoNation style swarm transmissions
and distributed processing and to turn over the code (copyright and all)
to them. I asked them to provide me with a copy of their java code,
which they offered to do on their web page, and gave them a brief
description of other successful projects I've worked on in the past so
that they knew I could produce. They weren't interested - I got no
response from them, not even a 'No, thank you'. So, I'm working on
doing the same thing with the gnut code. (Note: I might be a little
off on the above - it was a very long time ago.)
If you look closely at the structure of their company and
organization you can see that they're very closely tied to
a VC outfit. I think the web pages about helping to
develop the gnutella protocol and network etc are just a
way from them to steal ideas from people.
Here's a pretty good article about VC's from an engineer's
perspective:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/sep01/speak.html
Granted the article is a little slanted. But the idea that
VCs and big established corps can get crypto stuff out there
in a way that allows it to serve the ideals of cryptoanarchy
is one that should be questioned. If good crypto ideas are
tied up by software patents, NDAs, and copyrights, it is much
more difficult for those ideas to do anyone any good. When
you go to a company like Lime, there's a danger of that.
Cypherpunks should support the FSF and GPL'd software because
the GPL helps protect cryptoanarchist ideas and code from being
tied up by patents, NDAs, and copyright. The GPL helps ensure
that programmers like me, who support the ideas of cryptoanarchy,
can take the code and do something with it.
Discussing the ideas on this list is a good course of action.
But, do we really want or need to ever deal with Lime? People
will migrate off Lime once something better and free is
available.
- VAB
- ---
V. Alex Brennen [[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
F A R B E Y O N D D R I V E N !
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.4 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76
iD8DBQE7lH9y+pIJc5kqSz8RAuC9AJwMmyTp3KvqdAKyzrDNKUTi9WwqpgCfeapA
5oQEniKtscERDwTVTJVu+oM=
=9sbJ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
