Google Summer of Code "Adding License Verification to Amarok"

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

Hello Asheesh

While surfing a list of the accepted projects for this years GSoC, I
stumbled over the abstract of the proposal "Adding License
Verification to Amarok" (
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/cc/appinfo.html?csaid=57B43064A433273E
) by Sam Neubardt. I am one of the Amarok developers. I am, among
other things, responsible for integrating the Magnatune.com store in
1.4.4 and Jamendo.com as well as a number of other online services for
the upcomming Amarok 2.

First of all, and to get it out of the way, I am quite astounded that
you would work on and accept such a proposal without ever getting in
touch with any of the Amarok developers to discuss the project. This
also leads me to another issue. The project describes ( I can only
read the abstract, so I don't know if this is specified further in the
main text ) adding another column to the playlist for displaying
license information. This to me, indicates that the project proposal
is based on the current stable 1.4.x series of Amarok, as Amarok 2
does not ( primarily ), use a column based playlist anymore. The
Amarok 1.4.x branch is currently in bugfix only mode, and we will not
be adding new features to it. The vast majority of our development
work currently goes into the upcomming Amarok 2.0 which will hopefully
see a release this summer. I am not saying that the functionality
cannot be added to Amarok 2, only that quite a few f the assumptions
of the proposal might not be valid for Amarok 2 as it is technically a
very different beast.

Also, the second part of the project, creating a standardized XML API
that online services can implement to make it possible to integrate
with many different clients is, in my view, a huge undertaking. I had
actually considered trying to put something simmilar up as a GSoC
idea, but decided that if it was to be done right, it would simply be
too ambitious. That said, I am currently involved in creating an XML
based API for the Ampache ( Ampache.org ) media server that I intend
to use as a base for a generic API once it is stabilized and has
received some real world testing and polishing.

To sum up, I think the project is interesting, and it is something we
could be interested in having in Amarok, but in its current form there
are a number of big issues caused by the fact that developing this for
Amarok 1.4.x is futile as this branch will likely only see a very
limited number of bugfix only releases in the future ( and we will
absolutely not include any major new features ). And again, I must
express my profound confusion about you guys not getting in touch with
us to discuss the proposal.

You can read about the new Amarok 2 on my blog (
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/categories/18-freespirit ) or in the latest
installment of our newsletter, the Amarok Insider (
http://amarok.kde.org/en/node/458 )

I hope to hear from you soon so we can get a dialog started and find a
constructive solution for both Amarok and the Creative Commons. Feel
free to write me directly, or to drop by channel #amarok.dev on
irc.freenode.net where most of the Amarok developers can be found. FYI
I am also forwarding this mail to our developer only mailing list.

Best regards

Nikolaj Hald Nielsen