asv108's Journal: LionShare on /.

For the past few days I've been at the Internet2 conference, in Indianapolis, In. My boss gave a talk to the internet2 P2P working group and we also had our first organizational meeting, discussing the collaborative efforts between the other parties (Internet2 middleware, OKI, Simon Fraser University) and the Penn State LionShare team. Last week a press release went out about the LionShare project, then a few articles. One such article came from Penn State's student newspaper, the Collegian. The press release was obfuscated but accurate, unfortunately most of the articles got quite a few things wrong. It really wasn't a big concern, until someone posted the collegian article to /. !

So where to start, its really unfortunate that our website isn't up yet (2-3 weeks hopefully). There is an older outdated pre-grant website that is sparse on content and contains an outdated conceptual paper from last year.

The collegian article and /. got quite a few things wrong, first off the university of British Columbia has nothing to do with Lionshare. We are planning on collaberating with some developers out at Simon Fraser University. They are part of the team working on a really interesting Canadian initiative called eduSource.

I really don't have time right now to go in to a detailed description of LionShare but here are some quick snippets.

• Logging is not a main part of our proposal but the capability to log activity will exist.
• Students will be able share among each other
• The intial prototype was based on Limewire, but using Limewire is not set in stone.
• The LionShare architecture uses a hybrid p2p protocol that introduces a server to the mix, allowing for persistence. Users can post files to a peerserver, and shut off their lionshare app. We are looking at making this PeerServer space browser accessible, so you can share stuff with people without forcing them to download the app. When our authorization code is in place, users will have the ability to upload to a PeerServer, and set the ACL to deny all, transforming the publication tool in to a remote backup tool.
• The main concept of LionShare is called the "Three A's: Authentication, Authorization, and Accountability. We currently have "alpha" kerberos support.
• The purpose of the grant is to turn LionShare in to a possible production service, but includes 2 big concepts (federated P2P with Shibboleth middleware and connecting to fixed repositories with the OKI and the IMS DRI spec.
• Lionshare will be open source, hopefully all GPL. We will have an oss site with CVS, lists, etc

When the website is up with all the information, grant proposal, and community pages, I will post it here and hopefully get an accurate submission to /. :)