Back from sabbatical after like six years (read: if you think you have waited for long, think again)
Hi and take a good read if you will:
After sabbatical in a monastery for like six years :), I ‘offer’ a chance to everybody to take a step back and read an even back-then very interesting support and discussion board thread from like ages ago on getsatisfaction.com. (neatly archived on archive.org and archive.is)
getsatisfaction discussion archived on archive.is: http://archive.is/Wv4s5
getsatisfaction discussion archived at TheInternetArchive: archive.org
Eventually I found back to the inter-webs again and even revisted old virtual places and learned about new developments so to speak.
You think you have seen it all or waited on maidsafe for long? Oh boy, I very much think, you are in for a big surprise 
You think you running low on the cool aid and growing ever more impatient? You think you will be all fine with the most valued professional 
(minimal viable product)? Think again.
You have not seen any bumps, nor bugs nor blockers, nor dead ends, nor re-design nor live product just yet. Far from it. You and all of the rest can not possibly imagine how this all settles and turns out in the long run.
We have not seen networking with multiple nodes on home or private networks, let alone on corporate or highly elaborate or complex and grown network architectures and crazy stuff.
We have not seen endless problems with the networking stack and its architecture on buggy cpe (customer premises equipment a.k.a. home routers), we have not even dealt with ipv6 after all these years as maidsafe is still with ipv4 and nat and all the related glory and troubles.
I have dealt with my fair share of networking gizmos and goblins and little helpers, apps, and tools, and hardware and software that industry and projects all throw at you and never care about the pain they release and unleash upon the public.
So you guys think you have seen anything for the past year or even two years since this forum opened or all the hype and buzz attracted public attention? You are so very wrong.
I am far from perfect myself only take into consideration that we are at the very beginning of a hard and bumpy road and potential redirects and dead-ends.
Maidsafe and others want to take on a different and completely new paradigm of calling data and addressing it instead of calling servers, sites or ip addresses. Although as far as I have revisited the public information of recent maidsafe decisions it sounds as if it was more of a hybrid network concept as some leaders were speaking about direct node to node connections for streaming or directly interacting from one node to another, instead from one node into the truly cloud-esque data-pool where you would only name and address and call and be delivered data bits. There would be no hosts any more to be talking to, only grouped and non grouped data chunks, bucketed with plenty metadata. All computation would be taking place on nodes of the owners themselves. Of course one could run nodes and create services that would compute and operate on data and create pre-grouped stuff that would be useful to others and that others could subscribe to and all.
If you find it hard to grasp the concept of calling out for data and not having anything to worry about servers, or ip addresses, then I may suggest you to take a basic look at the well-known Freenetproject that only works with this concept and has had their fair share of troubles bugs and endless fundamental problems with this concept. Data disappearing, data being lost in the depths of nodes and data stores, data being disconnected and separated from the major network and all kinds of stuff.
So everybody have a good ride and again IMHO we haven’t seen just anything yet (literally as well of how maidsafe will do. And we will spend endless bug-reports, will be endlessly cursing and amusing ourselves and ranting and entertaining and encouraging the developers the community…
Also there was the question about all those philosophical aspects of shouldn’t maidsafe be blocking certain types of data and all the related ideas that come to mind. But I consider maidsafe be rather (better be) like your tcp/ip stack or other fundamental stuff in your today’s computers or related devices, and not something high level as in a mail client where you maybe want to block uce as an example.
Nobody would want to build a network interface that would lose certain kind of bytes or bits or like a hard disk drive or a screen that blocked you from saving or displaying certain files or content. It is a dangerous road where people ask you to build a non-universally computing entity.
So I might go back to sleep again to complete the dozen and return again then to see how or if all of this turned out :).
Fare-well and have a good read and thorough analysis of the situation here. Good luck and best of progress to everybody involved.
