Fergie's Tech Blog

BitTorrent creator slams Microsoft's methods

Renai LeMay writes on ZDNet Australia:

Microsoft's proposed competitor to BitTorrent is "vapourware" and its paper on the subject is "complete garbage," BitTorrent founder Bram Cohen claims.

Writing in his blog about Microsoft's planned 'Avalanche' distributed file-sharing solution, Cohen said people were taking the product too seriously.

"I'd like to clarify that Avalanche is vapourware," he wrote. "It isn't a product which you can use or test with, it's a bunch of proposed algorithms. There isn't even a fleshed-out network protocol. The 'experiments' they've done are simulations."

"It's a bad idea to give too much weight to simulations, especially of something so hairy as real-world Internet behaviour."

Cohen came down heavily on the research paper that Microsoft used to introduce its technology. While the paper attempted to compare the Internet traffic methodology behind BitTorrent to Avalanche, Cohen said the analysis came up short.

"I think that paper is complete garbage," he wrote.

posted by Fergie @ 6/21/2005 07:17:00 AM