Interview with Sun’s Tim Bray and Radia Perlman – Part 1: Web history and future, P2P

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web, today I interviewed two distinguished people from Sun Microsystems – Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). Sun of course was one of the key Web companies from the 90′s and is still going strong today, under the leadership of Jonathan Schwartz. I discussed with Tim and Radia the past 15 years of the Web and also looked ahead to its future. We also talked about things like P2P and its place on the Web (see below).

Both have been in the computing business a long time and have had very influential careers. Tim Bray co-invented XML 1.0 and was Tim Berners-Lee’s appointee on the W3C Technical Architecture Group in 2002-2004 – amongst other accomplishments. Radia Perlman, who has a PhD from MIT in computer science, specializes in network and security protocols. In 1983 (according to a Sun timeline of the Web) she invented the spanning tree algorithm and is also sometimes referred to as the “Mother of the Internet”. So these are two incredibly smart Web technologists – and to be honest I was a bit nervous about speaking to them! Note that this interview will be published across 2 posts.

…..Radia is also not a big fan of peer to peer when it comes to the Web, but she notes there are different interpretations of what P2P is. “Peer-to-peer as primarily geared to being able to trade copyrighted information [...] is the reason why people want to do it.” She says that from a technical point of view, it’s much better to have central sites where you co-ordinate and certify people. She thinks that doing it in a pure P2P way (i.e. decentralized) “makes security and scalability very difficult”. Her ideal is having central sites where you rendezvous, so you know what is where. And then the file goes peer to peer from that point.

…..Perhaps showing my technical naivety, I pursued the question of whether P2P will be used more over time in media and business – a la Skype today. Tim then asked Radia to give me an overview of “why true peer to peer is hard to build in a world of Nets”. Radia said that true peer to peer means that everyone can be anonymous. But she says having central sites where people can register is key to making the Web scalable. Also Radia is concerned by the security aspects of ‘true’ P2P – e.g. people could send damaging files around. So that’s why both Radia and Tim are skeptical of my notion that P2P will drive more and more activity on the Web going forward.