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O'Reilly Network Weekly
Open Source Roundtable
Sponsored by IBM developerWorks

Crunch Time for Napster
09/15/2000

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Final briefs are being filed in the Napster case, before a three-judge panel decides the fate of the embattled file-swapping service. This week we'll talk to Nick Petreley, the founding editor of LinuxWorld who recently argued in InfoWorld's The Open Source column that it's wrong to confuse the issue of Napster with free speech.

We also talk to Matt Greeley, the CEO of BrightIdea.com, which has launched a spinoff site, SaveNapster.com. Matt worries that crushing Napster will hurt peer-to-peer computing. We'll find out what ideas people have to save the service and the technology.

Nicholas Petreley
Founding Editor, LinuxWorld
Linux Evangelist, Caldera Systems

"People are using Napster to violate the copyright of music and using free speech as an excuse to do so, or in some cases using 'the future of technology' as an excuse to do so. I just don't think that that is morally correct. It's theft under the law."

Matt Greeley
CEO of BrightIdea, Inc.
Founder of SaveNapster.com

"I think the shift to peer-to-peer networking allows us to see a new potential in the network that we didn't see previously. Napster has really brought this to the mass public. ... You have an open public space on your personal hard drive ... so any sort of application that requires a distributed data store is open game. And I think we haven't even begun to fathom the possibilities of what is possible."

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