[Mnet-devel] Freenet, Mnet, GNUnet, Circle

[Zooko]

Dear p2p-hackers:

Someone wrote to the mnet-devel mailing list and wanted to know how  
Mnet compared to similar open source p2p systems, because he wanted to  
work on one of them.  You can read the <a  
href="http://lists.mnetproject.org/pipermail/mnet-devel/2004-July/ 
003429.html"> thread so far </a> in which Kademlia, eDonkey, and  
BitTorrent are dismissed and GNUnet, Circle, MixMinion, and Tor  
introduced.

In writing the following response, I thought it was of sufficiently  
general interest that I should Cc: it to p2p-hackers.


> Why does Freenet get all the press if Circle and GNUnet perform
> essentially the same service???

Beats me.  I guess nowadays it doesn't, anymore.  Anyway, it isn't  
exactly the same service.  Circle doesn't offer anonymity, for example.  
  (Although <a href="http://thecircle.org.au/about.html"> the Circle web  
page </a> confusingly tells me that it offers anonymous "news" but not  
anonymous "file-sharing".)


>  How mature are Circle and GNUnet
> and easy to pick up relative to Mnet???

I would say all four are similarly "mature".  Freenet and Mnet are the  
oldest (both began in 1999 or so, if you count Mnet's ancestor Mojo  
Nation), but the newer GNUnet and Circle probably benefited from  
starting with newer ideas and a fresh codebase.

Mnet v0.7 has newer, simpler ideas and a fresh codebase relative to  
Mnet v0.6, which had simpler ideas and a fresh codebase relative to  
Mojo Nation.  :-)

I think you should try picking up one or more of these projects and  
then report back about how easy or hard it was to pick up, or other  
observations you have.  Trying it out is probably a better way to  
decide which you like than talking about it is.

There are some important architectural differences.  Mnet is  
(currently) strictly a "publish/download" model of shared decentralized  
storage, as is Freenet.  GNUnet offers the option of "file-sharing" in  
which you can store your own file on your own hard drive and also make  
it available to peers.  I don't know about Circle.  There are lots of  
other differences too, of course.


> I would imagine we
> want the best one to get better and take over the world to avoid
> duplication of effort.  Do any of these other P2Ps have design
> flaws like Freenet??  Which is the winner is the best design, best
> documentation category???

I rather disagree.  These four projects are exploring different parts  
of the design space.  Any one of them is quite likely to fail (or at  
least to lose a lot of time) by attempting to colonize parts of the  
design space that turn out to be inhospitable.  Also, these various  
parts of the design space might prove to be good for some uses but bad  
for other uses.  Finally, inasmuch as these are all public, Free  
Software and non-patented projects, they can learn from one another's  
successes and failures.  I say the more independent explorers the  
better!  Happily, there are a lot of them.  I'm sure there are at least  
half a dozen other similar projects which I don't even know about.

Also, open source projects that are primarily exploratory probably  
don't scale up well to very many developers.  For example, I perceive  
that Freenet has suffered more than it has benefited from its  
popularity among would-be helpers.  In the entire four year history of  
Mojo-Nation-then-Mnet as an open source, volunteer project, we've had  
eight people who have contributed lots of work over a long period of  
time, plus fourteen people who have contributed enough work to be  
credited in <a href="http://mnetproject.org/repos/mnet/CREDITS"> the  
CREDITS file </a>, plus uncounted hundreds of people who offered  
suggestions, criticism, or encouragement.


Anyway, I'm quite confident that having an argument about which Free  
Software decentralized filesystem(ish) project is best would waste a  
lot of time and energy and would result in all projects progressing  
more slowly rather than any project progressing faster.


Regards,

Zooko