Re: [GNUnet-developers] Freenet 0.5

[Igor Wronsky]

On Mon, 28 Oct 2002, Tracy R Reed wrote:

> Freenet just released 0.5 and aside from being flooded today from all of
> the publicity freenet has been working rather well lately. Is there
> anything gnunet can learn from freenets trials and tribulations?

That is apparently a troll, but someone has to fall for it, 
hooks and all.  ;)

Unfortunately, I haven't been following freenet's development
too closely lately and I don't know what kind of design choices 
they made and what they learned from them. Their mailing list 
could probably provide hints, but its traffic has been too high. 
But if you (or someone else) can give a brief overview, I'm sure 
we'd all be glad to hear.

To answer your question, on a very general (and trivial)
level, some of the following issues might be worth noting.

a) Design first.
b) Pay for expert(s) to work on the project full-time.
c) Use dictatorial development model - have a person or
two who adequately know each and every part of the project.
It will help if those persons have knowledge of related 
research fields to know directions where most gain can be
achieved by developing or adapting existing algorithms 
from the literature (routing, data-structures, etc) 
d) Don't reinvent wheels.

Maybe lack of some of them caused some of freenet's
previous problems -- which hopefully are in the past now.
GNUnet seems to have followed most of those points <grin>, 
but realization of part b would be most useful at this point,
and one can never know enough about ongoing and past 
research.

Eventually user community will most likely help on
the application side (with more detailed clients etc) 
when/if project gains popularity.


Igor