[Kde-extra-gear] Re: P2P file sharing software in KDE's CVS

[Petter E. Stokke]

On Sat, 2003-11-01 at 21:32, Klas Kalass wrote:
> Regarding kmldonkey: If there is still someone feeling that its exitance in 
> KDE should be discussed, please CC the authors so they can give statements.

And here's my statement, FWIW (being the maintainer of KMLDonkey):

First, about P2P in general and its presence in KDE. P2P is such an
extensive issue that adopting a general "no P2P" stance would be
catastrophic. I believe that KDE _must_ at some point provide an
implementation of the BitTorrent protocol - sure, it's a matter of a few
minutes' googling to find torrents for the latest Hollywood screeners,
but the predominant use (and original intention) of the protocol is
perfectly legal. Saying no to BitTorrent makes about as much sense as
saying no to FTP and DCC (which are still the initial distribution
points of pirated software). A similar case can be made for Freenet,
which does enable one to access both illegal and seriously immoral
material, but whose primary function is the enforcement of the right to
free speech.

On the other hand, providing suport for P2P protocols such as FastTrack
(Kazaa), which serve no obvious purpose except the illegal
redistribution of copyrighted material, might prove unfortunate. While I
know there is immense end-user demand for these applications, and I
doubt KDE would be at risk legally for providing them (to my knowledge,
there has never been a legal attack on an open-source implementation of
P2P software), it could still potentially lead to unwanted attention if
such software were provided in the core KDE distribution. Indeed, it's
probably fortunate that knapster never made it further than kdenonbeta.

Now, about KMLDonkey in particular. As has been pointed out already, it
doesn't by itself provide support for any P2P networks, it only serves
as a frontend for the mldonkey application much in the same way that
KMail serves as a frontend for a mail server (less so, perhaps, because
KMail knows how to send mail on its own, but KMLDonkey doesn't know how
to share files). It may be more obviously associated with illegal
activity than, say, in the case of Konqueror and pirate FTP sites, but
the fact remains that it doesn't even contain any code that could in any
way be used to perform an illegal act, and it does have obvious
legitimate uses, such as serving as a comfortable download manager for
mldonkey's BitTorrent facility.

Add to that the fact that KMLDonkey is in extragear and not kdenetwork
(I'd almost have thought that suspiciously inappropriate myself), and
that it's separate from the KDE distribution to the extent that web
pages, release downloads and mailing lists are hosted elsewhere (KDE
only provides CVS and translation), and the legal risk to the KDE
project really becomes less than obvious. Even if someone were silly
enough to sue over it, I expect there'd be a fortune to be made in
countersuing them for wasting the court's time.

Finally, regarding Apollon, the application which sparked the debate in
the first place; that too is only a frontend to a P2P application,
although it's less obviously decoupled from giFT than KMLDonkey is from
mldonkey. It even requires giFT to be installed to be able to compile,
while KMLDonkey is completely separate from mldonkey. Moreover, the
legitimate uses of the only networks giFT supports (FastTrack, Gnutella,
OpenFT) are less obvious. While I personally doubt any problems would
arise from including it in extragear, it's certainly more borderline
than KMLDonkey.

-- 
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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