Wrapping things up with a call for partners

After almost a year of hard work, i eventually realized that the P2P OS project is facing some very serious threats which i just don't feel capable of negotiating all by myself, so i decided to wrap things up with this "Call for partners" post. In a nutshell, here's a super-condensed list of the key things that might be of interest for a potential partner to this project:

• what i managed to do so far is to build a proff-of-concept skype alternative; in fact, the P2P OS networking algorithm has been deigned to allow for a much more robust P2P network than skype's, in the sense that while skype requires a large number of computers with direct internet connection (i.e. public IP or single-router UPnP) in order to support its network (about one such computer for ~100 registered users), P2P OS does not have any such restrictions (i.e. the P2P OS network is self-supporting even if all the computers in the network are running behind routers and/or firewalls).
• i believe this project can become a skype killer because of some key differentiators: it's open-source, it's not collecting any user data, and it consequently can be deployed (and replace skype) in corporate environments
• important: this project is intended to be released under some form of open source license primarily for allowing code inspection and for making it free for home users; however, the program can be released under a dual license, with a commercial license for business users
• i believe money can be made from this project if it is finalized, e.g. by monetizing it as a product (this can be particularly interesting for companies wishing to host their own private network), building services around it (there's a rather large set of options here, including per-user subscriptions for guaranteed uptime), third-party apps advertising on the P2P OS home page (sort of a marketplace, but only for hosting the apps' ads, i.e. without actually hosting the apps themselves), advertized sponsorships, etc, and of course, as a last resort, selling the project copyrights (potential buyers include open source-based and open source-firendly companies).

However, there are at least two major issues with this project and, as far as i can see, with any P2P-based application that someone would want to develop these days, and these two issues are also the sole reason for which i decided to put this project on hold:

• catch 1: the current version of P2P OS has been designed to circumvent the P2P connectivity issues specific to IPv4 in a NAT-based home network environment, but it does not implement provisions for supporting carrier-grade NAT (CGN), and, more importantly, porting the project to IPv6 might not be feasible at all. More specifically, whether any P2P application will be possible on the next-generation IPv6 networks depends on how IPv6 residential gateway devices (RG) will be implemented, and i can't find any way to guestimate, let alone negotiate, this threat because of the very large numbers of factors involved (e.g. whether the high-profile internet companies such as MS, google, or yahoo will lobby for P2P support or not, whether the large ISPs will consider P2P connectivity as being important to the end users or not, whether the present-day high-profile P2P applications such as skype or yahoo will keep their current P2P model or they will transition to a relays-only model - said applications already use relays whenever one user is on a 3G network, etc)
• catch 2: when i started this project i assumed an OS landscape that will allow easy porting and deployment via Qt on all three major desktop OSes Windows, OS X, Linux, plus on at least two major mobile OSes Android and Nokia's MeeGo. However, things have changed dramatically in the sense that (1) porting to the new Windows 8 mobile will be a tough nut to crack (to say the least) because of the limited WinRT API it offers by sandboxing the applications, (2) Nokia abandoned its efforts with MeeGo (so no Nokia port), and (3) Qt has been spun-off (read: all-but-abandoned) by Nokia such that the future of an Android port is uncertain at best; additionally, my paranoid view on the course of MS' and Apple's market strategies suggests that there is a real danger for Windows Phone/Tablet OS and iOS ports to be prohibited by these two OSes. To rise, Qt will probably still be a usable tool for porting P2P OS to the future versions of Windows Desktop, OS X, and Linux for the nest 5 years or so (i.e. porting to these OSes should be fairly easy), but the mobile and tablet ports might prove to be mission impossible.

Keeping the above in mind, should anybody be interested in learning more details about this project and its associated risks should it be continued, please drop me a line.

Update
As i gather more info on the current trends in CGN deployments (reading some articles e.g. from CISCO and Juniper on this topic and talking to industry insiders), adding full CGN support to P2P OS (or any other P2P application for that matter) increasingly seems technically impossible because of the algorithms that ISPs are enabling on their CGNs (namely, most ISPs seem to opt for what it's called EDM - endpoint dependent mapping, which maximizes the reuse of the CGN ports but breaks P2P), such that an IPv4-only P2P OS implementation will probably be impossible for the coming years when CGNs will be the IPv4 connectivity norm for the end user.