eDonkey, for example, is moving to comply with intellectual property protection, and is "throwing in the towel" on the way it has been doing business.
And BitTorrent is turning its back on piracy, and is trying to become a file-sharing service for legitimate files.
Here's a prediction for you: Both will fail as legitimate commercial enterprises.
The reason: these services were not popular because they had a compelling architecture. They were popular because they allowed people to get valuable stuff for free. To steal, in other words. The business for helping people get legitimate content will be a tiny fraction of the business of helping people steal.
My colleague Tony Healy has pointed me to an interesting blog article on "Architecture Astronauts." The idea here is that some techies have a tendency to become enamored with a particular software architecture, and loose sight of the actual utility of the application. They forget that people want stuff, not technology. An excerpt:
These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts. It's very hard to get them to write code or design programs, because they won't stop thinking about Architecture. They're astronauts because they are above the oxygen level, I don't know how they're breathing. They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don't contribute to the bottom line.A recent example illustrates this. Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.
All they'll talk about is peer-to-peer this, that, and the other thing. Suddenly you have peer-to-peer conferences, peer-to-peer venture capital funds, and even peer-to-peer backlash with the imbecile business journalists dripping with glee as they copy each other's stories: "Peer To Peer: Dead!"
The Architecture Astronauts will say things like: "Can you imagine a program like Napster where you can download anything, not just songs?" Then they'll build applications like Groove that they think are more general than Napster, but which seem to have neglected that wee little feature that lets you type the name of a song and then listen to it -- the feature we wanted in the first place. Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn't peer-to-peer but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it would have been just as popular.
Good stuff.