Shirky On P2P

There's an interview with Clay Shirky over at O'Reilly's OpenP2P network regarding P2P. Some of the piece is wordy ruminations over what peer to peer (and dear lord do I hate that term) is, and where it's going - but the most interesting part, IMHO, is the talking about web services and the changing definition of "client" and "server".

Re:P2P

[GlassUser]

Well email WAS peer to peer, way back in the day when you would telnet into a server (or just use a serial cable with a dumb terminal), you had POP and SMTP right there. Later in the day, it would dial up with whatever peer was scheduled, and belch out its mail, get fresh mail, and sort it. Repeat for the next host. It's only recently that we have the luxury of most servers having high-speed always on connections.

And it goes marching on

[kurowski]

I never cease to be amazed by how much effort is put into creating new ill-conceived technologies to work around old ill-conceived technologies. For example,

• because we chopped up the IP address space based on byte boundaries rather than bit boundaries, an artificial scarcity was created that led (in part) to the widespread use of DHCP and NAT
• DHCP and NAT arguably broke DNS and prevented people from running traditional server processes on their boxen so we created P2P software
• due to the numerous security problems that surface (due primarily to misconfigurations) we invent firewalls that block traffic
• due to firewalls blocking everything but HTTP, we invent a whole new protocol stack on top of HTTP (i.e. SOAP)

and so on and so on... I'd include the push of XML to "fix" the problem of differing binary data formats, and the creation of XML Schemas to make up for the lost type information in all those mismatching DTDs and so on. But you all get the point.

I do admit that the ultimate goal of the web services vision is admirable, but it seems to me to be just a bloated (UDDI+WSDL+SOAP+XMLSchema+HTTP(+P2P?)) version of what many software agent research groups have been after for years. Come on people, stop the insanity! There's gotta be a better way!

(and no, I didn't read the whole article, i had to stop and release the built up rant pressure before the insanity blew my head open. go ahead and mod me down for being an offtopic troll now.)