If WebDAV could do it, why was it so har for Chandler? Chandler's peer-to-peer approach meant there was no central server to be what developers call, with a kind of flip reverence, "the source of truth". WebDAV's server stored the document, knew what was happening to it, and could coordinate messages about its status to multiple users. Under a decentralized peer-to-peer approach, multiple copies of a document can proliferate with no master copy to rely on, no authority to turn to.
Life is harder witout a "source of truth". For programmers as for other human beings, canonical authority can be convenient. It rescues you from having to figure out how to adjudicate dilemmas on your own. After just a few weeks at OSAF, Dusseault became convinced that the peer-to-peer road to Chandler sharing was likely to prove a dead end. The project had little to show for its efforts to date anyways. "But it was like, we're doing peer-to-peer. We have to. We said we would. We decided to."
(Rosenberg: p. 213)
WebDAV was certainly much better suited to the project they had in mind that peer-to-peer. The same could be said of the traditional client-server approach. So, what's the morale of the story? Even the best hackers make mistakes when they let themselves be influenced by hype.
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