History
OFF development started within the hacktivism group The Big Hack in 2003 by the hackers Cheater512, CaptainMorgan, Aqlo and WhiteRaven. In 2004, a rudimentary version was finished, written in PHP, which was distributed as two demo CDs. Following these, SpectralMorning re-implemented the functionality in 2004 in C++, which lead to the current "mainline" OFF client.
On August 14, 2006, CaptainMorgan posted a letter of "closing" addressed to the "Copyright Industry Associations of America", such as the RIAA and MPAA, stating that they have created OFF with the purpose of ending "all of your problems with consumer copyright infringement."
| “ | Today we announce a massively distributed copy-less file system. A place where all content is available instantly, anonymously and to everyone, without breaking any laws. Today we announce the Owner-Free File System. An island of sanity in your sea of madness. | ” |
In 2008, the network consisted of around 50 nodes. On April 11, 2008, a beta test was held with a network size of over 100 nodes. Since SpectralMorning stopped work on OFF in late 2008, only minor bug fix releases were made to mainline OFF.
Starting from 2007, an alternative, but compatible client was developed, called BlocksNet. Written in Ruby and well-maintained, it saw major improvements over recent time.
The client OFFLoad is a fork from mainline OFF, which seemingly adds no features. Reasons for the fork are unclear. Another distantly related program is Monolith, which uses a similar principle to OFF. It was created after OFF and features no multi-use of blocks and no networking.
Read more about this topic: Off System
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