It wasn't the DMCA or the RIAA's fault (honest).

The AllPeers BitTorrent service for Firefox announced today that they were shutting down their service because they weren't meeting investor expectations.

In a blog post Matthew Gertner, AllPeer's CTO, noted that AllPeers has not achieved the kind of growth in their user base that their investors were expecting, and as a result they were not able to continue operating the service

When we started working on AllPeers, we knew that it was an ambitious project with no guarantee of success. Such is the nature of any software startup. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

When I last spoke with Gertner back in September of 2007 he told me that though AllPeers is open source it isn't run as a non-profit. The goal was to make money eventually.

As it turns out with Web 2.0 you actually have to make money to stay in business (go figure).

Since AllPeers technology was open source however, users aren't totally out of luck. If there are users that want to continue to develop the technology and possible expand it or re-invent it they could. That's the magic of open source, just because a company is dead doesn't mean the technology must die as well. It will be interesting to see in the months ahead what will actually happen to the AllPeers technonology and whether or not Gertner's investors jumped ship a little too early or not.