Hi Nikolaj,
Thanks for the detailed analysis and information. You're of
course
right; we should have contacted the Amarok developers before
accepting
the proposal, so my sincere apologies for that gross
oversight. We're
definitely fans of Amarok -- both generally and the
Magnatune/Jamendo
integration in particular, so we were excited about the idea
of seeing
CC license support included in the library. Our previous
experience
with a student working on Banshee support was generally
positive
(although the code wound up not being included for a variety
of
reasons) so I think I personally made some assumptions that
were
obviously incorrect. I apologize for any frustration that
caused on
your side.
Do you have a good feeling about whether it'd be possible to
add
support to Amarok 2 for CC licenses? I've cc'd Sam, the
student who
submitted this application. Sam, what contact with the
Amarok
community have you had? With the codebase? I'd love to see
this
project happen but realize that I should have done my
homework.
Regards,
Nathan
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:03:22 +0200
> From: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen <nhnfreespirit gmail.com>
> To: asheeshcreativecommons.org
> Cc: amarok-devel <Amarok-develkde.org>
> Subject: Google Summer of Code "Adding License
Verification to Amarok"
>
> Hello Asheesh
>
> While surfing a list of the accepted projects for this
years GSoC, I
> stumbled over the abstract of the proposal
"Adding License
> Verification to Amarok" (
> http://code.google.com/soc/2008/cc/appinfo
.html?csaid=57B43064A433273E
> ) by Sam Neubardt. I am one of the Amarok developers.
I am, among
> other things, responsible for integrating the
Magnatune.com store in
> 1.4.4 and Jamendo.com as well as a number of other
online services for
> the upcomming Amarok 2.
>
> First of all, and to get it out of the way, I am quite
astounded that
> you would work on and accept such a proposal without
ever getting in
> touch with any of the Amarok developers to discuss the
project. This
> also leads me to another issue. The project describes
( I can only
> read the abstract, so I don't know if this is
specified further in the
> main text ) adding another column to the playlist for
displaying
> license information. This to me, indicates that the
project proposal
> is based on the current stable 1.4.x series of Amarok,
as Amarok 2
> does not ( primarily ), use a column based playlist
anymore. The
> Amarok 1.4.x branch is currently in bugfix only mode,
and we will not
> be adding new features to it. The vast majority of our
development
> work currently goes into the upcomming Amarok 2.0
which will hopefully
> see a release this summer. I am not saying that the
functionality
> cannot be added to Amarok 2, only that quite a few f
the assumptions
> of the proposal might not be valid for Amarok 2 as it
is technically a
> very different beast.
>
> Also, the second part of the project, creating a
standardized XML API
> that online services can implement to make it possible
to integrate
> with many different clients is, in my view, a huge
undertaking. I had
> actually considered trying to put something simmilar
up as a GSoC
> idea, but decided that if it was to be done right, it
would simply be
> too ambitious. That said, I am currently involved in
creating an XML
> based API for the Ampache ( Ampache.org ) media server
that I intend
> to use as a base for a generic API once it is
stabilized and has
> received some real world testing and polishing.
>
> To sum up, I think the project is interesting, and it
is something we
> could be interested in having in Amarok, but in its
current form there
> are a number of big issues caused by the fact that
developing this for
> Amarok 1.4.x is futile as this branch will likely only
see a very
> limited number of bugfix only releases in the future (
and we will
> absolutely not include any major new features ). And
again, I must
> express my profound confusion about you guys not
getting in touch with
> us to discuss the proposal.
>
> You can read about the new Amarok 2 on my blog (
> h
ttp://amarok.kde.org/blog/categories/18-freespirit ) or
in the latest
> installment of our newsletter, the Amarok Insider (
> http://amarok.kde.o
rg/en/node/458 )
>
> I hope to hear from you soon so we can get a dialog
started and find a
> constructive solution for both Amarok and the Creative
Commons. Feel
> free to write me directly, or to drop by channel
#amarok.dev on
> irc.freenode.net where most of the Amarok developers
can be found. FYI
> I am also forwarding this mail to our developer only
mailing list.
>
> Best regards
>
> Nikolaj Hald Nielsen
>
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