Apollon soon in kde-extragear

[Zack Rusin]

On Monday 09 February 2004 20:02, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> The FastTrack network -- as I understand it the primary protocol used
> by Apollon -- is overwhelmingly used for trading copyrighted
> material.  Both the authors of the primary client for that network
> (Kazzaa) and users of it have had legal action filed against them in
> the US.

Actually that's not true. People associate Apollon with FastTrack 
because it's the most widely used network out there. It's also the only 
one decentralized p2p network (not counting bootstrapping node which 
FreeNet avoids quite nicely) which had some success. Gnutella's query 
storm, even with query hop limit is simply unacceptable. Anyway, I 
could be talking about p2p networks for a while, but as far as this 
discussion goes: giFT, which Apollon actually is a frontend for, has 
only two network plugins by default OpenFT and Gnutella. FastTrack 
plugin is hosted completely separately from giFT and not included with 
it by any distribution. Besides obvious legal ramifications FastTrack 
is a closed protocol.
Of course that hardly solves the problem of legality of giFT as it does 
offer Gnutella and OpenFT which can be used for exactly the same 
purposes as FastTrack network. Personally I'd like to see a network 
plugins for BitTorrent or FreeNet which can be used as anonymous and 
automatic CDN's ("Akamai for the common people" ;) ). That's the huge 
advantage of those networks over the others - they are actually useful 
for real stuff and don't have to protect their legality on the weak 
"some people want to share their office documents and photos of their 
kids with their friends and family" argument. . 

> It's also of note that copying CDs is legal; distribution of them is
> not.  K3b does not provide anything for aiding in the illegal step
> and it can be easily argued that in its most usual mode of operation
> that its use is legal.  The same is not true for Apollon.

Yap. But having automatic CDN for things like new linux iso's, common 
websites/images, demos, apps is totally awesome and that's what p2p 
networks are evolving too. 

Having said that and after just taking a look at Apollon I think it's a 
very nice app. Considering that it's only a frontend for giFT I don't 
see how could it be consider as infringing anything. Especially that it 
actually doesn't access network - giFT does. 

Zack

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