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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: PROPOSAL: Drop aKtion from KDE kdemultimedia package
From:       Nick Betcher <nbetcher () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-12-18 8:07:35
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On Tuesday 17 December 2002 11:58 am, Rob Kaper wrote:
> Kit uses a GPL'ed protocol, Kopete supports mostly proprietary protocols,
> making it a potential legal hazard (at least the unauthorized use of the
> various protocol icons is).

a.) We don't use AOL (TM) icons. The running man isn't patented afaik, and the 
icons we use are courtesy of a non-AOL employee who drew the icons by hand 
(aka, no copy and pasting of the original running man was involved).

b.) I haven't heard of a protocol to-date (not 100% sure of MSN) that 
explicitly disallows third party clients from connecting to their service. It 
is not in their license agreement or MOTDs. There are plenty of third party 
software companies in contact with AOL reguarding their protocol (including 
Microsoft, Cisco, and more) and using AOL's service with those clients.

>
> Furthermore, AOL has tried to block competing clients from their OSCAR
> servers repeatedly. While there have been no specific blocks of open source
> clients, many do experience accidental blocks whenever AOL tries to block
> MSN or someone else, so I would doubt the perennial status of OSCAR, not
> TOC.

Not really, I'll explain below.

Whilst reading through the source to the BeAIM (it's OSCAR-based AIM) client I 
noticed that the author was honest and basically just put in "BeOS 0.1 AIM 
Client" (or something to that effect) for the identity string (the one that 
"apparently" breaks all of the open source clients. His client survived being 
able to connect throughout the whole time AOL had been "supposedly" changing 
the "checksum". How is that? Well, it seems it's still a mistery to everyone, 
but I think a lot of the initial OSCAR developers (libfaim) jumped the gun in 
accusing AOL. Now I'm not saying it's not possible that they don't want 
third-party clients, but it's not likely. This is re-iterated with the fact 
that AOL has java OSCAR-based clients (at least I think they're OSCAR based).

As far as TOC, you can expect TOC to be disconnected once AOL gets all of ICQ 
and AIM interconnected. I think managing TOC is too much work for them (since 
it does have a tendency to screw up AIM accounts) and making it backward 
compatible with their new system is probably not worth while. The only reason 
they kept TOC is so that open source clients can connect to AIM easily, but 
now that we all connect via OSCAR anyways, they don't care. Their Java client 
is even going/(has)gone OSCAR.

Also, if this were the case (blocking third party applications) then it's 
reasonable to assume that ICQ would have been affected at one point, and it 
hasn't. Don't forget, OSCAR is used in ICQ as well as AIM.

I've chatted about this with Neil extensively, and he seemed to either:

a.) share my opinion; or

b.) agree with my analysis


As far as removing Kit, I think it's something reasonable to do since I do 
share the idea of code reusage. The only point at which it will be removed 
is:

a.) TOC is disconnected;

b.) Kit becomes unmaintained; or

c.) Neil agrees to have it removed

					Nick Betcher
 
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