Freenet
Aug. 5, 2001
I was browsing the web today looking for an open-source project that I could devote my considerable Java expertise to. "What lucky project might I bless with my services?" On sourceforge, I found a wonderful little project called Freenet, which seeks to develop a distrubuted, anonymous version of the WWW. It looks like its coming along well. However, I think it has one major disadvantages compared to the web.
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<br>You can't have dynamically generated Freenet sites. This makes it near useless as far as modern technology goes. If I can't generate content on demand, how can I cater to the tastes of my users? Of course, used as a repository for mp3s, subversive political content, etc. it is excellent. What would be really nice is a way to link from traditional HTML to the freenet sites, and have the freenet content downloadable by HTTP. That way, it could be easily accessed via a web browser. It seems unlikely that any information dispersion system could match the web as far as home use.
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<br>Aside from that, the system looks very interesting. I'm going to continue shopping around for that perfect project however, but this looks like a great first candidate. I'm happy to know that whatever project I eventually thrust myself upon will be at least as good as this one.