There is an ongoing discussion on human rights on the Internet on the IRTF HRPC mailing list that I want to express an opinion on.

I would also like to stress that this is not an official position of the Interpeer Project. Although we are yet small, there exists already a variety of positions amongst contributors on all kinds of topics. No, this is a purely personal opinion.

For context, the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) is a sibling to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) that does not get a lot of publicity. While IETF concerns itself with standards on interoperability of current networks, IRTF looks further into the future. The HRPC list concerns itself with Human Right …

I was recently reminded of the fact that people use the term “peer-to-peer” to mean a variety of different things. That can make conversations on the topic difficult, as with any situation where you assume you have common ground, only to discover that is not the case.

In this interlude, I want to – really quite quickly – disambiguate some things, as a kind of reference for future conversations. You don’t need to agree with me. Though if that’s the case, I’d be interested to hear about it!

Protocols

The most basic source of misunderstanding I encounter regards what exactly constitutes a protocol, never mind if it’s peer-to-peer or not.

The term …

There’s something rotten in the state of FOSS, and it’s not the software. It’s the community – or more precisely, the communal spirit.

This post deviates a little from the regular topics. I do not intend to write a lot on this topic here, unless you, dear reader, provide me with feedback that it fits your interest. Consider it an experiment while work continues on implementing the protocol suite as usually discussed here, and there are fewer technical updates to write.

F(L)OSS – What is it?

Many of my readers will be able to skip this section, but I do not want to lose those who can’t. The thing that is commonly described as “Open Source” in …

It’s not what you think it is.

A few weeks ago, I led my connections to a single-question survey, asking what the currently most utilized distributed consensus algorithms is. This isn’t the largest group in the world, but it’s also a fairly mixed bunch: a majority is in the tech industry, but almost as many are not. Some or old guard, some entered the field only a while ago. Some are more research inclined, some more practically oriented.

I figure it makes a decent survey group.

Without further ado, let’s look at the answers.

Raft and Paxos dominate

takes up 36% of the answers, and 29%. Raft is the more modern of the two, designed to be simpler than Leslie …