Dijjer -- free/open BitTorrent alternative -- seeks new maintainer

Ian Clarke, the hacker who created the secure publishing tool FreeNet, is looking for someone to take over his BitTorrent competitor, Dijjer. He writes,

Dijjer is a really cool little piece of software that I initially developed as a skunk works project within Revver back in 2005. It was born of a few key frustrations with BitTorrent.
Due to other commitments, I'm now looking for a talented Java developer to take on the challenge of maintaining and progressing the Dijjer project, and I'm hoping that BoingBoing can help me find such a person :-)
Dijjer is a free (as in speech) P2P app that allows the distribution of large files to lots of people with little or no bandwidth overhead, in many regards it solves the same problem as BitTorrent, but with some key differences, which include:
* Dijjer doesn't need trackers, to publish a file on Dijjer it just needs to be available on an ordinary web server.
* Dijjer streams downloaded files directly to your web browser, or your audio or video player, as they are downloaded.
* Dijjer uses "UDP hole-punching" to communicate through firewalls without any need to manually reconfigure them.
* Dijjer forms one unified P2P network, rather than a separate network for each file, which allows it to scale up much more quickly.

Link (Thanks, Ian!)

Discussion

Take a look at this

#1 posted by zuzu

, March 21, 2008 10:20 AM

Dijjer is a really awesome piece of software, similar to Coral Cache. I hope this gets picked up by some enthusiastic and dedicated developers.

#2 posted by zikzak , March 21, 2008 12:12 PM

Dijjer is cool as a technique for distributing legal content, but its centralization means it's not nearly as censorship-resistant as BitTorrent, which I think is why it's not popular. Using Dijjer for the distribution of illegal data or information powerful institutions would like to suppress isn't very successful. And honestly, that's one of the largest uses of BitTorrent.

#3 posted by epp_b , March 23, 2008 11:22 AM

I have to agree with everything ZIKZAK, #2.

Digger sounds pretty neat for distributing your own stuff from your website without breaking the bank to pay for bandwidth, but that's probably about it.

For anything else, it would appear that they only thing it has over the bittorrent protocol is that it doesn't require casual users to download a client. Other than that, the centralized nature of this application makes it impossibly censorship-prone. This is, unless they distribute the server-side application, in which case it is no longer "tracker free". Additionally, the files need to stored on a web server anyway, which is a good thing for the former example (distributing files from your website), but useless for anything else.