Now the fruits of that correspondence can be seen. Or rather, they can almost be seen. Uprizer, the company that Kramer and Clarke have formed, remains mysterious. There is no Web site, and when I talked to Kramer, who is the CEO, he refused to say when the Los Angeles company would release its first product. He also refused to talk about funding except to say, "We have some." Even the number of employees remains a secret.

Is Uprizer trying to be the Transmeta of P2P? Kramer, 40, says that he is reticent to talk because the details are still being worked out. "Ian [Clarke] is only now on his way here to California," he says.

Still, some things at Uprizer are set in place -- like what the company is not, and what peer-to-peer will eventually be. Kramer was more than happy to discuss these subjects.

What exactly is Uprizer?

Uprizer is a technology infrastructure company, which will leverage the Freenet platform.

Leverage it into what areas?

I can't tell you that.

Well, are you taking the same tack as Scour.net, making deals with the record and movie industry?

That's always been Scour's main focus, but let's just say a majority of our business model is not focused on content distribution. We are not the next Napster. Everyone thinks that Ian is starting this company for file-sharing; that because Ian is a stalwart for the freedom of information, that's all he wants to focus on. We applaud him in that, but that's not what Uprizer's all about. Uprizer is about leveraging a technology that has powerful functions.

And there is a wireless play involved.

Wireless?

I can't tell you about that either.

Well then maybe you can tell me why you think the record labels won't come after you just like they've gone after Scour.net and MP3Board.com?

We're not a consumer play. Freenet is Freenet. We won't control and can't control Freenet -- even if you put a gun to Ian's head, as he's said. Freenet is out and it will do what it does the same way that people will use videotape for legal or illegal purposes. We are not the next Napster, therefore we are not trying to aid and abet a Napster-like environment. We will support content consumer plays but we will support them as a technology infrastructure company.

So you're hoping to let the consumer plays take the fall or at least test the waters ...

We have no intention of breaking laws. We have no desire to do that. We're not 19-year-olds; that is not our mission in life. Our mission is to efficiently flow information through Internet, intranet, extranet and closed-network environments.

Technology infrastructure is a broad term, though. Are you focusing solely on selling to businesses, like Digital Island?

Uprizer is focused on both enterprise software and consumer applications; it's both for business and the consumer. But I just want to reiterate that Freenet is Freenet and Uprizer is Uprizer; Uprizer is not the next Napster. Scour wants to be the next Napster; AppleSoup wants to be the next Napster. That's not our goal in any way, shape or form. We have a much different business plan.

We believe this could be an alternative, better, synergistic Akamai [which minimizes Web congestion to sites like Yahoo and CNN by regulating traffic through its servers]. It's a multi-level network. Akamai has 4,000 servers; we could have millions of servers, servers being a euphemism for computers.

And what would happen to Freenet if Uprizer becomes commercial? Will additions and improvements to it remain open-sourced?

Freenet will stay open-sourced. We support that in the same way that Red Hat supports Linux.

The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.