Google Summer of Code "Adding License Verification to Amarok" (fwd)

[Nathan Yergler]

Hi Nikolaj,

Thanks for the detailed analysis and information.  You're of course
right; we should have contacted the Amarok developers before accepting
the proposal, so my sincere apologies for that gross oversight.  We're
definitely fans of Amarok -- both generally and the Magnatune/Jamendo
integration in particular, so we were excited about the idea of seeing
CC license support included in the library.  Our previous experience
with a student working on Banshee support was generally positive
(although the code wound up not being included for a variety of
reasons) so I think I personally made some assumptions that were
obviously incorrect.  I apologize for any frustration that caused on
your side.

Do you have a good feeling about whether it'd be possible to add
support to Amarok 2 for CC licenses?  I've cc'd Sam, the student who
submitted this application.  Sam, what contact with the Amarok
community have you had?  With the codebase?  I'd love to see this
project happen but realize that I should have done my homework.

Regards,

Nathan


>  ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>  Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:03:22 +0200
>  From: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen <nhnfreespirit at gmail.com>
>  To: asheesh at creativecommons.org
>  Cc: amarok-devel <Amarok-devel at kde.org>
>  Subject: Google Summer of Code "Adding License Verification to Amarok"
>
>  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
>