The good folks at Red Hat released their newest product, Red Hat Linux 9 last week. As Red Hat Linux is a GPL product, allowing anyone to freely distribute it, an enterprising developer used it to promote his new peering technology, Bittorrent.
Though it’s still rough around the edges (even I had trouble installing it, and I’m an old-school Linux hacker), the technology behind it is solid. I was totally amazed to watch it download three CD’s worth of software faster than I could have ever hoped to download it from an FTP server. Many times faster.
It works by chaining folks together as they download. For instance, once one person grabs a chunk of file, that person’s chunk gets shared by others who need it. Rather than all these people flooding a handful of FTP servers, they cooperatively share the files amongst themselves. Thus the download can scale almost without limit.
Keep an eye on this project, because tools like BitTorrent will soon rule the Internet.