SJ Mercury: Tech leaders talk up peer-to-peer's potential

"In a University of San Francisco classroom, a select group of high-tech luminaries quietly gathered Monday to discuss one of the most talked-about trends in technology today: peer-to-peer networking, or P2P. ... The informal meeting, organized by high-tech book publisher Tim O'Reilly, was in itself a statement about the technology trend. Each of the 20 guests -- from IBM research fellow Steve Burbeck to Gene Kan, developer of file-sharing technology Gnutella -- was there to support the growth of P2P networking."

"P2P is most famously exemplified by the controversial music file-sharing site, Napster. But the meeting, called the Peer-to-Peer Summit, was meant to show that P2P goes far beyond swapping music files, said O'Reilly. And each attendee was there as part evangelist and part student about the emerging technology. "My objective was to get a bunch of people together to brainstorm," O'Reilly said."

"Attendees included Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Corp. researcher David Stutz, Intel Peer-to-Peer Evangelist Robert Knighten and Michael Tiemann, chief technology officer of Linux software provider Red Hat Inc. There were also leaders of P2P upstarts such as Scott Miller of Freenet and Nelson Minar of distributed computing provider Popular Power."

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