Apollon soon in kde-extragear

[Petter E. Stokke]

On Tuesday 10 February 2004 13:49, Anne-Marie Mahfouf wrote:
> It seems that nobody answered the question:
> what is the difference between KmlDonkey and Apollon?

The difference is that KMLDonkey doesn't at any point implement or link to 
any kind of P2P protocol implementation, whereas Apollon has a compile 
time dependency on giFT. KMLDonkey doesn't even require any P2P software 
installed on the same machine to be useful; it's frequently used to access 
a remote mldonkey installation.

> are the networks they access different?
> (It also seems to me that gnutella is mainly used to share illegal
> copyright material.)

KMLDonkey only accesses one thing: an mldonkey daemon. There's absolutely 
no P2P code in KMLDonkey itself. It only presupposes an mldonkey 
installation somewhere that the user has access to. Mldonkey is mainly a 
client for the eDonkey/Overnet P2P network, but has lately acquired decent 
support for BitTorrent, HTTP and FTP. It also has experimental support for 
other P2P networks, including FastTrack and Gnutella2, but these are a 
long way from being anywhere close to useful, as I understand.

> As for the upload, I had a look at kmldonkey and could not suppress the
> upload sharing.

Unless I misunderstand you completely, doesn't that rather invalidate the 
definition of P2P?

> So again, what's the difference between that and 
> Apollon? I never used Apollon to be franks but for the strict user point
> of view, it does not make any sense to have KmlDonkey and not Apollon,
> just because one network is 'worse' than the other.
> This is maybe a 'reduced' point of view for some people, this is the
> point of view of the average user. The average user knows it's
> infringing copyright to get an illegal copy of music CD or software. He
> can do it using KmlDonkey.

He can also do it using Konqueror in place of KMLDonkey. I'm not being 
facetious - mldonkey has an excellent HTML interface built in; in many 
ways superior to KMLDonkey. Whether mldonkey is used for copyright 
infringement or not remains the user's responsibility - it's not like the 
act of installing mldonkey automatically converts all your music CDs to 
MP3 and shares them on the net. It doesn't even try to tell you how to do 
so.

> Get kmldonkey out of keg or get apollon in.

While I (especially after reading the article Waldo mentioned) can't see 
how Apollon would be a legal liability for KDE, I still maintain there is 
a difference between the two: KMLDonkey has no P2P code, and doesn't link 
to any P2P code.

(In fact, I'm not even sure that Apollon does; my understanding of the giFT 
architecture is incomplete, but I suspect the libgift dependency only 
involves the code for interfacing with a remote giFT client. If that is 
so, Apollon's case becomes even stronger.)

-- 
Petter E. Stokke <gibreel at project23.no> http://www.gibreel.net/
PGP key: http://www.gibreel.net/key.asc
Fingerprint: 4FF3 12BD 692A 0FFF 984F  78DA 4776 81FB 1906 3A9F
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