I'm pretty sure OSS gets a free ride on mirrors, because of peering agreements: if traffic between networks is equal, nobody has a case that they're the stronge

I'm pretty sure OSS gets a free ride on mirrors, because of peering agreements: if traffic between networks is equal, nobody has a case that they're the stronger party on negotiations, so no money changes hands. If there's an asymmetry, theres' an argument that one side has more demand or need for peering and use that as leverage to demand payment. So smaller ISPs that want to balance out a lopsided consumer traffic, will set up mirrors to protect themselves from this. Since OSS is free to redistribute, a loose federation of mirrors has set up to better match ISPs who want to send more bytes with projects that need to send a lot of bytes. > Are there any big downsides to distributing torrents as opposed to traditional FTP/HTTP Analytics is the big reason Mozilla shut down their community FTP mirrors, and bit torrent doesn't really solve that portion.