Bug#154312: ITP: mldonkey
Hi,
a lot of rumbling has been going on here and on the mldonkey list so I
though I would summarise the current state:
1. mldonkey supports several P2P protocols, all but the edonkey one
are free.
2. The edonkey protocol binaries have been removed from savanagh. They
are "free" but the author doesn't want to give them out because he
fears that they might be used to abuse the edonkey network. I have two
versions of the secret files as source, one for mldonkey-1.16 and one
for a cvs version that doesn't quite compile.
Since the files where compiled into the mldonkey-1.16 release and that
has a GPL license those files are also GPLed, so the issue of mldonkey
being GPL could be forced. That would probably ruin the relationship
with upstream.
3. The author might change the license of the donkey core to make it
distributable in half closed source form (with the precompiled *.lam
file). He said he wants to keep mldonkey free software and would give
source to intrested parties but hes dead set of not distributing the
source of the core.
4. There is a GPLed edonkey client for windows called emule
(http://emule.sourceforge.net/). I'm thinking about using that to
write a new free donkey core for mldonkey. This might or might not
bother the author but he would have no grounds of arguing against it.
5. Nobody wants to package mldonkey at the moment? Unless someone
comes forward I will package it during the rest of the week. What I
will do with the donkey support I will see then. The current donkey
protocol of mldonkey is not distributable at all so that can't even go
into non-free. Without a license change upstream rewriting or forcing
the GPL is the only option.
MfG
Goswin
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