This commentary is not earth shattering but it does seem to reflect at lease one reasonable view of P2P circumastaneces.
http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2005/10/28/p2p_future_driven_by_opensource.htmP2P is going back to its open-source roots.
In response to industry litigation and high business risk developers are increasingly returning code to the wild.
They are giving it back to the community with major clients like Shareaza and Limewire opening up, open distros like eMule, and more to come.
Shutting down or converting the top P2P clients will have little effect on the overall open P2P networks.
Only a tiny fraction of file sharers will stick around for the euthanized versions that the RIAA finds acceptable.
We've already seen millions of people stampede from Kazaa to eDonkey and other clients in response to big music's initial and only effective interdiction program.
As the top clients stagnate, die, or transition, their users will migrate to friendly analogs. eDonkey fans will change horses to eMule, Limewire users will chill with Frostwire, and Kazaa folks will frolic with MLDonkey.
A hundred clients have already bloomed using today's existing P2P protocols. Thousands more will bloom totally legal on the highways of download.com, the hamlets of SourceForge, the side streets of Google, the back alleys of IRC and personal web sites, the countless foreign villages of Russia, China, and the world, and even the hush of the darknets.
This evolution exposes the exponential futility of the record industry's litigation against the top P2P companies, as well as the senseless Supreme Court ruling that bases liability on mind reading and smart marketing.
I wonder if WinMX is classed as a darknet yet..
Perhaps we will see some open sourced variant for folks to access the network, maybe not, but I for one will not listen to some guy in a suit telling me I cannot do something completely legal because they may lose a sale on an overpriced peice of plasic, a fallacy that has been explained to them time and time again
I dont need to tell you all that we have so much ground to recover its staggering, but Winmx will join the list of recognised networks again and we can speed that up by doing all that we can to get friends neighbours etc reconnected, the real battle is out there in folks home,s on the streets and in hearts and minds.
