Meaning of P2P (was: Re: [ox-en] Re: The nature of apple trees)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:39:08 +0200
Hi Amine and all!
2 days ago Amine Chadly wrote:
you can't say that P2P means illegal copying of digital products.
It's a way to exchange digital information (not necessarily illegal)
in a decentralized form.
Instead of everybody getting the information from a central points, each peer
makes available the parts it already got, and gets what it lacks from
other peers.
Agreed. There is the technology meaning of P2P also which I forgot.
However, from my perspective P2P as a technology means makes only
sense if you can not set up a central server with enough network /
storage ressources.
Basically there are two reasons for this: You just don't have this
server but want to do distribution of this kind - Debian torrents are
such an example. Or it is illegal to set up a server with the type of
information you want to distribute. IMHO the last one *by far* is the
more important application of this technology.
For a digital product, you have an initial cost, and copying it costs
virtually 0.
How much should one pay for it ?
Indeed inside an exchange based system this is one of the major
difficulties of setting prices. You have to map the development costs
to the expected number of sells. If you misestimate the number of
sells in the wrong direction then you have bad luck...
But this applies not only to software. Cars meanwhile have the same
problem - once more highlighting the point that given the productivity
of today the production of an instance of a physical product is more
and more neglectable in many interesting cases.
Grüße
Stefan
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