Secondary only to the labor, the most significant costs with providing a free software solution is cost of the bandwidth consumed by distribution. Many differnt efforts have been started to attempt to mitigate these costs. The most successful examples include mirror networks which are mostly homed at higher educational institutation and in centralized corporate sponsorship.

As free software continue to grow in populaty and is deployed at ever increasing scales, the educational mirrors are begging to become over burdend. It is not uncommon to attempt to download a software release only to recieve a connection limit refusal message. Further, educational institutions are finding themselves increasing attempt to reduce bandwith usage at their institutions due to heavy utilization by increasingly internet savy students.

While corporate sponsorship has also been scaling, in the most prominent example at kernel.org, it is doubful that the kernel.org sponsorship would extend if the Linux Kernel found itself at the level of usage that Microsoft Windows currently does.

Under the increasing demand and loads many companies, even with assistance from the educational mirrors, are finding that they need to address peaks with subscription only services. The RedHat corporation, for example launched a subscription based service to provide a prefered form of access in order to ensure customers were able to get security updates on the source code which they where running.

The need for individuals and companies to pay for thier own bandwidth forces companies into commertial models. For companies whose core business in the distribution of free software, this can be devistating. They are forced to attempt to derive new bussiness models which most often are contrary to the sprit of the community even though they may confrom to the letter of it.

It is dissapointing that companies such as RedHat are finding themselves in this prediciment since the techology exists to handle distribution. In the rapidly developing are of peer to peer (p2p) networks we can find solutions which would allow users to take on minimal costs assocated with content distribution. Networks such as bittorrent and gnutella present solutions. Emmerging technology seen in non production quality networks such as freenet show technologies which could contribute to scalibility above and beyond the current networks.

Companies, individuals, and organizations, which provide free software must look to these alternative emmerging technologies in order to mitigate the costs of distribution. If they do not the monetary need of the old content distribution models will hold significant influence on their corporate missions, their business plans, and their corporate culture.

CryptNET has formed the Free Software p2p Network in the hope that the necessary programs and documentation to facilitate this transition can be provided and subsequently adopoted by the leading content producers in the community.