# What is freenet? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 13, 2005, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-freenet/284585 "2005-01-13T19:19:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Cornelius\_Tuggerson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/13edae/32.png) [@Cornelius\_Tuggerson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cornelius_Tuggerson)\ **Post date:** [January 14, 2005, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-freenet/284585/21 "2005-01-14T23:22:59Z")
I think its great that freenet is making our streets safer for thieves. As long as people keep efforts like it going the goverment will keep having to spend unreasonable amounts of money in order to monitor or censor information. If censoring the internet was easy or cheap then it would be all too short before it became yet another version of US network television, never really censored but always “looked after” by the FCC. It would only react to complaints, but there are idiots that complain about everything including wikipedia material. Freenet makes it hard to decipher whats going through a wire at any time and where it came from. If you are loosing money because of your inability to do that, thats a problem with your business model not with freenet. ---
**Author:** ![RandomLetters](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8edcca/32.png) [@RandomLetters](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RandomLetters)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2005, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-freenet/284585/22 "2005-01-15T14:43:03Z")
> [@Bill H.](#): > > True. (well, sorta true. Several open source communities are, Fedora comes to mind. I don’t know of a single reasonably-established software company doing this.) Blizzard (you know the guys that make the Starcraft, Diablo, & Warcraft series of games) use a slightly modified modified version of bittorrent to distribute files. Valve (they just came out a little game called Half Life 2) hired Bram Cohen last year (the creator of bittorrent) and bittorrent code is included in the Steam Client. ---
**Author:** ![Bill\_H](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a5b964/32.png) [@Bill\_H](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bill_H)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2005, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-freenet/284585/23 "2005-01-15T17:24:29Z")
**RandomLetters** wrote > [@](#): > > Blizzard (you know the guys that make the Starcraft, Diablo, & Warcraft series of games) use a slightly modified modified version of bittorrent to distribute files. Valve (they just came out a little game called Half Life 2) hired Bram Cohen last year (the creator of bittorrent) and bittorrent code is included in the Steam Client. Interesting. A couple points about this: first, it sounds like though bittorrent technology is involved, a general purpose bittorrent client is not required. And I’ll be very surprised if it doesn’t stay this way. Distributing upgrades via BitTorrent has an advantage to the manufacturer. But distributing billable content has a distinct disadvantage, in that thievery will occur. second, I question the value to the company of distributing via bittorrent. Bandwidth is cheap, and is a tiny percentage of the costs of sales. For an open source distributor of software, where revenue is zero, it makes sense. I’m not sure why game manufacturers do this, and wonder if this practice will die off in time. third, I suspect game players may have a different mentality towards this than other consumers of software products. If I bought downloadable software from say Microsoft, I’d be a bit upset if they told me that in order to download it, I had to make available some of my upstream bandwidth to them for others usage. More importantly, I’d be **very** upset that total strangers who were not Microsoft would be connecting to and downloading from my computer. I mean, I’m paying for the damn software; I don’t want to be part of their distribution mechanism. ---
**Author:** ![Ms2001](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ms2001/32/18463_2.png) [@Ms2001](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ms2001)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2005, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-freenet/284585/24 "2005-01-15T18:45:21Z")
> [@Bill H.](#): > > second, I question the value to the company of distributing via bittorrent. Bandwidth is cheap, and is a tiny percentage of the costs of sales. For an open source distributor of software, where revenue is zero, it makes sense. I’m not sure why game manufacturers do this, and wonder if this practice will die off in time. Bandwidth isn’t all _that_ cheap, but I suspect it has more to do with balancing sharp peaks of load. Remember that at the moment Half-Life 2 was finally “activated” after it’d been sold to thousands of gamers, there was so much load that the Steam authorization servers couldn’t keep up… and they weren’t even sending much data. If there had been a patch to download at the same time, there’s no way Valve would’ve had enough bandwidth without the P2P system to get it out to everyone quickly, even if their servers could handle the flood of requests. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-freenet/284585.md?page=1)