It’s a good read, he talks about how he didn’t like working at napster, what soulseeks imediate future holds for it, and other stuff….
Steve: Many p2p applications tend to have spyware and other third party software bundled with it, what do you think of this practice? and will Soulseek ever contain this type of software bundled with it?
Nir: People tend to become very alarmed with bundled software, often for very good reasons, but not always. There are advertising packages that do nothing more than locally track a user’s web browsing preferences and present customized advertising in the software with which it was bundled. Still, I’m as fond of advertising as the next guy, and we’re very proud to be able to run a system that is completely ad-free and still live off it. So the answer is no, we won’t bundle any third-party software with Soulseek.
Steve: Soulseek is a very community oriented file sharing program, Many users have said it feels almost like it was back in the days of napster, was this by design? or did it just kind of happen?
Nir: By unintentional design I guess having learned most everything I knew about programming file-sharing applications working at Napster, it was only natural I would come up with a system that was in some ways reminiscent. Like Napster, we had to give up certain community-oriented features to be able to scale. But I’d like to think we maintained most of the important ones.
Steve: Why does soulseek not have multisource downloading capabilities?
Nir: I’m asked about this very often. The short answer is: I’m lazy. The longer answer is I believe from personal experience that multisourced downloading improves content accessibility at the expense of personal communication. Keeping track of who you’re downloading each thing from may be a pain in the ass, but it’s a useful reminder that you’re somewhere where there’s other people, and that what they give you can’t be taken for granted. It keeps people more honest.
The interview is quite a bit longer you can
check it out here
