During the past two years since i started working on P2P OS there has been some significant progress on the WebRTC
project which two years ago looked more like a statement of intent than
anything else; and since WebRTC is backed by big players like Google,
Mozilla, and Opera (with Microsoft notably missing from this lineup after it flushed $8 billion down the drain last year on Skype and it's now pitifully crying foul and trying to screw things up again), it might eventually turn into a viable P2P solution
that could make P2P OS rather redundant. However, while a side-by-side
comparison between P2P OS and WebRTC does have some merit, i think the case for
which of the two will come on top (in terms of quintessential project goals) is far from being settled at this point in time, mainly because WebRTC pays little to no attention to properly
dealing with the very real (and critical) problems that the real-world internet topology of today and tomorrow pose to P2P connectivity: in a nutshell, WebRTC opted for a conservative SIP-like technology wherein it falls back to using
a network of dedicated TURN relay servers whenever a direct P2P connection
between two nodes cannot be made,
with little consideration to the fact that such a relay server network
requires some big-pockets "sponsors" that can throw in enough ca$h to
keep it up and running (e.g. Viber pumps some $2.5 million a year to keep its rather small-ish network up and running), and i think it's very likely that users will be forced to have/get a Google/Mozilla/Opera/M$/whatever account in order to use the service.
Alternatively, P2P OS aims at creating a self-reliant
P2P network which is meant by design to gracefully navigate both the rough waters of
the current IPv4 exhaustion and IPv4-to-IPv6 transition, and the
promised shiny days of a P2P-friendly IPv6-only world of the decades
ahead. Also, the scope of P2P OS is not restricted to point-to-point communication between nodes; instead, its design goal is to provide a generic foundation for content-centric networking (a.k.a. named data) where point-to-point communication is only one of many use case scenarios.
To rise, while i can see WebRTC as a serious potential
competitor to P2P OS, i think abandoning P2P OS because of WebRTC would
be premature at this point in time.
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