Apollon soon in kde-extragear

[Andreas Pour]

"Petter E. Stokke" wrote:
> 
> 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.

But giFT is not distributed by KDE.

> 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.

And this is legally relevant, how?

The legal argument a/g Apollon seems to be the presumption that it would be used
primarily for unlawful copying.  Is there any reason to believe, that the
factual distinction you raise, changes this presumption?  If so, why?

> > 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.

Nor in Apollon, right? (I mean, it relies on giFT for the P2P stuff, no?)

> 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.

So you are suggesting that the legal distinction, which I thought is based on
presumed usage, depends on whether the network technology is implemented by a
daemon or linked library?  I just don't see this point as in any way
sustainable.
 
[ ... ]

> > 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.

How that is legally relevant, is a total mystery to me.  This is not a claim
that Apollon infringes giFT copyright but that it is a facilitator, and the
facilitator argument is entirely independent of whether there is library linking
or socket connection.

I would note in both cases I assume the actual network implementation is
independent of what KDE distributes (giFT and mldonkey).

> (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.)

I am not sure about this either, but if Apollon has some actual network code in
it, then one might consider carving this out and distributing it separately from
KDE, and leaving only the GUI in KDE as an option.

But in the end, since the argument is one of facilitation, I am not sure any of
this is making a difference.

Ciao,

Dre