I'm sure we all know what a plugin is, so I don't feel the need to go into that. The point of this post is to bring to light how beneficial such an approach to P2P data sharing would be.

Many of you probably realize the obvious benefits. One base application (the underlying functionality, lower-level procedures, etc) written by a talented group of people can pass its user base on to a multitude of talented individuals. This means that, instead of working against eachother (which so many programmers have been doing throughout the life of P2P; ie, kazaa, winmx, gnutella, etc), they work with eachother, towards the same goals--enhancing the system.

Of course, there are benefits that many of you may not have realized yet. Considering the recent debates on legal issues, a single small group of people is considerably easier to 'shut down' than a large, decentralized programmer base. Also, considering the lack of specialization in the base program, there would be literally no legal way to illegalize the base program.

Then, there's the virtually unlimited imagination of thousands of people. All these features that users have been clamoring for (that you may think are impossible to implement) may be a possibility once you have thousands of people working on it.


Personally, if I saw a distributed data network protocol with inherent plugin functionality, I'd hop on that bandwagon and likely never get off.