openCOLA refreshes you best

openCOLA is more than a funny name. It’s the company that is emerging as the de facto leader in technology’s hottest new trend, peer-to-peer (P2P) computing. The “open” part of the moniker represents “open source,” and the COLA part is an acronym for Collaborative Object Look-up Architecture.With offices in Toronto and San Francisco, openCOLA is not only developing a buzz as the hottest player in this space, it’s doing it the old fashioned way – with open source.

openCOLA is convinced that transparency is the name of the game, especially when introducing a new technology to the public. And nothing assures transparency more than open-source programming. People like to know what the software on their machines is doing. Does it have any hidden operations? Is it reporting the contents of my hard drive back to a central server? Does it respect my privacy?

Right now peer-to-peer computing is more sizzle than steak. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon coding up a storm. But hardly anyone has thought through the trust issue.

Geeks understand the operations of p2p networking. Big deal. Geeks represent less than one percent of Internet users. For peer-to-peer computing to cross-over into the mainstream, it will have to become totally transparent. The public is quite unlikely to participate in the evolution of a powerful new technology unless it can trust the applications it is running.

openCOLA is quite happy to earn that trust.

openCOLA has been making its code available to the public since January 1, 2000. That tradition will continue. All current code releases are available fromopencola.com. Linux clients for some openCOLA products will be ready before the end of this quarter. And the public beta of openCOLA’s eponymous application will be available at the O’Reilly’s Peer-to-Peer Summit on February 14th.

Information on openCOLA products can be obtained from their Web site at www.opencola.com