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What is Freenet?

Freenet is a peer to peer system designed to let you publish and obtain information (web-like pages, files, chat forums, etc) without fear of censorship. It is a separate network within the Internet which provides anonymity for both those who publish (upload files or websites, post to chat forums) and those who download (browse, download, lurk, etc), while still providing reasonable performance, especially for popular files. Freenet has been downloaded by millions of users, and has thousands of active nodes. In version 0.7, we introduced the unique (but optional) "darknet" feature: Users can connect only to their friends, and yet still be part of a globally scalable network through the small world effect. This makes it very difficult to identify users or block Freenet. For more information, visit our website.

Freenet and Google Summer of Code

The Freenet Project is participating in Google Summer of Code for the fourth year running in 2009. Freenet is written in Java, and uses many different technologies - networking, encryption, databases, parsing, etc. For ideas for possible projects, see our wiki page about Google Summer of Code. Please contact us via IRC (#freenet on irc.freenode.net) or the mailing lists if you are considering working for us. You will need to fix a small bug or implement a small feature, to demonstrate that you have sufficient coding ability: we cannot judge students purely by their ability to write proposals! We will help you to understand how Freenet fits together, direct you to the right code, documents or bug reports, and give you an SVN account. If accepted you will be expected to use the mailing lists to communicate with other developers, but your mentor will be available for any questions you have, any time you get stuck etc. Expect your proposals to be revised significantly before we accept you, and please make more than one proposal if possible - you can make up to 20, and some projects are more useful than others.

We look forward to hearing from you!