P2P Is as Natural as Networking

For some reason, P2P (Peer to Peer) is regarded as an illegal activity that must be condemned and stopped. This is pretty stupid as P2P is just a way for two or more networked computers to talk to each other. What is really meant is that giving away collections of bytes such as digitized music or films is illegal as it infringes copyright and reduce the money they get. Of course though illegal there is empirical evidence (in music) suggesting that it gives artists wider exposure and increases their listening audience etc. P2P is just a mechanism to simplify moving the data as well as the task of finding and exchanging those byte collections.

Software such as BitTorrent go one step further by reducing the load on any originator of software. Instead of all copies coming from one point, as soon as anyone downloading has acquired a few packets of data they can be used as a source to download from. It's a valid way of distributing software such as Linux distributions. There are enough legal uses of P2P software that it can't readily be declared illegal. Of course ISPs can slow down P2P data streams so as not to saturate their networks but that is another question entirely. It relies upon the ISP's software identifying the data as being P2P and that's not always easy.

P2P is interesting from a computing perspective, as one possible way of networking applications. Mind you developing such software is not easy. One such platform for simulating networks is OMNeT++, a component system where modules are built up written in C++ for Linux and Windows 32. It's free for non-commercial use.

• Link to C++ Code Library