August 5, 2005

I put all my Freenet file back online with big red disclaimers on them.  
I had taken them off due to the Supreme Court decision about 
file-sharing software.  I htink the disclaimers are enough even though 
the programs were never meant to aid in copyright violation in the first 
place.  

But it all may be a moot point.  I've been pretty disgusted with the 
direction the Freenet devlopers have been talking about.  They have 
decided to go with a darknet for Freenet 0.7.  My understanding is that 
a darknet is a network that is "invite only."  Basicly, it would be the 
end of the central, unified Freenet.  On top of that, it sounds like 
they might break the API.  I have absolutely no plans of changing any of 
my software's back end to support an API change.  I'm starting to think 
that Freenet can go to hell.

I have been paying a lot of attention to Gnunet, which appears to be a 
network with similar functionality and goals to Freenet, but isn't as 
stupid.  Gnunet is programmed in C, and it requires way fewer resources 
for Freenet for this reason.  Also, they have a distributed file store 
like Freenet's implemented, but the system supports keyword searches, 
meaning index pages are not absolutely necessary.  The documentation of 
the project is light years beyond Freenet.  Freenet may as well be a 
closed protocol because they don't have an ounce of documentation on how 
it operates.  You'd have to browse the source code, which, by the way, 
is like a plate of spagetti.  I know the Gnunet authors mentioned to me 
on IRC that they looked at using Freenet source as a starting point, but 
the source code was way beyond unusable.  Gnunet seems to make steady 
progress and has already met or surpassed Freenet in almost every 
aspect.

The only problem with going to Gnunet is that equivalentsoftware to 
Exhale exists and is actually good, unlike some Freenet clients.  
However, it would probably be trivial to port Exhale to Gnunet.  The 
real meat of Exhale was the whole threading/queuing engine, which could 
be adapted to any system in a relatively small amount of time.  We'll 
have to see.

I'll see what happens with Freenet in the meantime.  One more release of 
Exhale maybe, and I'll probably stop all work on the Threaded Freent 
Get.  I think Freenet is probably close to over due to the devlopers 
scaring everyone away with threats of incompatibility and network 
resets.

Adios,
Jeff

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