Acronym-laden craziness! Earthlink has released SIPShare, a proof-of-concept P2P filesharing network that uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a tool originally designed for voice and video communications, to set up file sharing networks.



EarthLink believes an open Internet is a good Internet. An open Internet means users have full end-to-end connectivity to say to each other whatever it is they say, be that voice, video, or other data exchanges, without the help of mediating servers in the middle whenever possible. We believe that if peer-to-peer flourishes, the Internet flourishes. SIPshare helps spread the word that SIP is more than a powerful voice over IP enabler —- much more. SIP is a protocol that enables peer-to-peer in a standards-based way.

The emerging ubiquity of SIP as a general session-initiation enabler provides a rare opportunity to offer users all manner of P2P applications over a common protocol, instead of inventing a new protocol for each new P2P application that comes along.


Written in Java, with a BSD-style license, so it should be extensible in a way that Skype, Grouper, et al are not. Will be interesting to see if anyone uses this as a base for file-sharing + group communications.

[Many-to-Many]