Today I read that open source peer-to-peer software Bittorrent, is making an attempt to reach out to the market commercially. The downloading software was developed through a participation structure, where people on the internet contributed to the co-creation of the software. Bittorrent tried to reach out to the consumer market before, that is last year, via Phillips. Co-developer Olaf van der Spek was a assigned a research position at Phillips. The idea was that people would buy a hardware component to download programs on demand. They would pay for programs with a reduced fee and in return provide bandwith to upload the program for other consumers. I interviewed van der Spek to see what were the ups and downs. I also asked him what motivated him to participate in the making of the program. Here is the interview.

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