“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.”