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AllPeers makes the leap to open source

The folks behind AllPeers are hoping to stir interest in the Firefox-only P2P …

The folks behind AllPeers are hoping to stir interest in the Firefox-only P2P application by announcing the move to an open-source licensing scheme for the client application. The source code has been released and is dual-licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and GNU General Public License (GPL).

"We’re proud to announce that we’ve opened up the source code for AllPeers to other software developers. We hope that this will encourage developers to join our community, help us to improve our code and create their own applications on top of our platform," read a statement on the company blog.

The company unveiled AllPeers near the close of 2005, months after the US Supreme Court handed Hollywood a major victory against P2P software developers in MGM v. Grokster. Promoting AllPeers as a secure, "private" P2P system, the company champions a system that, in theory, would be impossible for third-parties to spy on. In the wake of MGM v. Grokster, AllPeers seemed to come as a big relief to those who sail the high seas of piracy.

Nevertheless, interest peaked and then quickly died down shortly after the application was released. A quick glance at Google Trends shows AllPeers largely flat for a significant portion of its history, and the service also seems to indicate that AllPeers has been largely dominated by interest in other P2P systems.

Despite the entertainment industry's best efforts, less sophisticated and less "private" file sharing systems still reign supreme. If users have been held back by the client's featureset, perhaps the community will dive in and do its best. Still, one wonders if this is a swan song for AllPeers.

Channel Ars Technica