Quo Vadis?

In early July, I asked - what if we were measured by how much we gave out and not how much we made? Judging by that yardstick, Bram Cohen would be a hero.

The creator of BitTorrent, which has more than forty million downloads till date, has removed the problem of downloading large files. The solution is elegant - the file to be downloaded is fragmented into multiple pieces. Each piece is then not downloaded, bit by elegant bit, from the source site, but through trading with computers of other people who are also downloading the same file. So what is downloaded (on priority) from the original site? The fragment that is the rarest. This way, movies, songs, large softwares like Solaris, RedHat Linux etc. can be downloaded without crashing the network or the host server.

But all that has nothing to do with the fact that he is a hero. He is a hero because he has measured his success by how much money other people have made using his application. You see, BitTorrent is free. It is registered under the open-licence policy. Bram Cohen does not make any money off the application. In fact, some of the new business models that he has introduced are already taken over by my favourite monster - Google. The article in Fortune points out that he is finally considering buying a car, now that his wife is bearing their child!

History is not known to reward pioneers - but is known to preserve their ideas for posterity.

But what is even more fascinating is an observation that a professor made of him - “If BitTorrent was outlawed and went away, I don’t think it would hurt him emotionally at all".

His response? "It wouldn’t leave me emotionally scarred,” he says. “I mean, I’m certainly going to try to keep that from happening. But if for some reason the shit hits the fan, you just deal with it. That’s the way I’ve always been.” If not for the fact that he is about couple of hundred IQ points ahead of me, I'd say we were twins.

But what is the wave of things to come - especially in the "open source" era? With companies like Software AG and Fujitsu jointly developing an SOA architecture, the direction is summed up beautifully in Scott McNealy's comments - "The simplest way to put it is that the network is the computer, and software-as-a-service is the tactical implementation of that."