Lem Bingley

As any air traveller knows, no matter how bad the weather looks from the departure lounge, there is always sunshine once you climb above the clouds. Or, if you prefer, every cloud has a silver lining. You just have to shift your point of view to see it.

Take, for example, illegal file swapping. Record companies that still think a CD single is worth four quid have, for years, refused to rise above the gloom. Instead they have adopted Canute-like cloud-busting techniques: laws, lawyers and a pig-headed refusal to acknowledge that in business, things change. It took Apple to highlight with its iTunes service that there is plenty of sunshine at 99 cents a song.

Christopher Noble of analyst firm The451 points out a related silver lining. Music and video files are invariably large, so a relatively small number of file-swappers can generate a disproportionately heavy traffic load. "ISPs are being swamped with peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic to the extent that it now accounts for 60 to 80 percent of available bandwidth," Noble writes. "This skews the economics of network buildouts. The ISPs need help, yet they are loath to try to simply block such traffic."

The universities have been under this cloud before: when MP3-swapping emerged a few years ago, many had to invest in traffic-shaping technology to allocate bandwidth according to the priority assigned to different data streams. This approach is expensive, but it lets file-swapping carry on as a background task that can never swamp more important data.

Now ISPs are being forced down the same route. But once they have paid for packet-inspecting gear, they will also have opened up new business opportunities. "With traffic shaping it is possible [for ISPs] to offer consumers premium accounts where time-sensitive traffic is prioritised," Noble argues. Mission-critical business traffic can be given priority over web browsing, for example.

Without the business problem of file-swappers to solve, the ISPs might never have been able to make the financial case for investing in traffic shaping. And ISPs that can readily support critical web services, for example, might have taken a lot longer to emerge.

In another part of the IT landscape, a particularly dark cloud hangs over Linux, cast by SCO's lawsuit against IBM, and by SCO's consequent demands for cash from large Linux users. This kind of showdown was going to happen sooner or later, given that Linux is unashamedly cloning the capabilities of commercial software.

You could argue that SCO has brought legal scrutiny to Linux at a very helpful time. Many corporates are considering moving mission-critical systems onto Linux; large numbers have already moved peripheral tasks. The current fuss over purloined code will ensure that tomorrow's Linux will be a safer place to put those vital apps.

Any developer will now think twice before bodging borrowed code into an open-source project. And it is a safe bet that Linux will emerge from the SCO experience whiter than lilies, as open-source devotees set about bleaching the code of anything that looks like it might belong to a software vendor.

So, we should all thank the file-swappers and SCO's lawyers for making the world a better place. Really, we should.

Have your say: reply to IT Week

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!