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.
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.
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.