MLDonkey is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

, multi-protocol,

peer-to-peer Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...

file sharing File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia (audio, images and video), documents or electronic books. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include ...

application that runs as a back-end server application on many platforms. It can be controlled through a

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

provided by one of many separate front-ends, including a

Web interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

telnet Telnet (sometimes stylized TELNET) is a client-server application protocol that provides access to virtual terminals of remote systems on local area networks or the Internet. It is a protocol for bidirectional 8-bit communications. Its main ...

interface and over a dozen

native Native may refer to: People * '' Jus sanguinis'', nationality by blood * '' Jus soli'', nationality by location of birth * Indigenous peoples, peoples with a set of specific rights based on their historical ties to a particular territory ** Nat ...

client programs. Originally a

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

client for the eDonkey protocol, it now runs on many flavors of

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

and

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like operating system designed for Power and PowerPC based computers. The core, based on the Quark microkernel, is proprietary, although several libraries and other parts are open source, such as the Ambient desktop. The p ...

and supports numerous peer-to-peer protocols. It is written in

OCaml OCaml ( , formerly Objective Caml) is a General-purpose programming language, general-purpose, High-level programming language, high-level, Comparison of multi-paradigm programming languages, multi-paradigm programming language which extends the ...

, with some C and some assembly.

History

Development of the software began in late 2001. The original developer of MLDonkey is Fabrice Le Fessant from

INRIA The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name French Institute for Research in Comp ...

. It was originally conceived as an effort to spread the use of OCaml in the open source community. In January 2003, Slyck.com reported brief friction between MLDonkey developers and the official Overnet MetaMachine developers, which denounced MLDonkey as a "rogue client", allegedly for incorrect behavior on the network. Versions before 3.0 have a known security vulnerability that allows an attacker with access to the web interface to read any file on the file system.

Features

Features of MLdonkey core: * Peer to peer (p2p) program that supports the following network protocols, either partially or completely: **

FastTrack FastTrack is a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol that was used by the Kazaa, Grokster, iMesh and Morpheus file sharing programs. FastTrack was the most popular file sharing network in 2003, and used mainly for the exchange of music MP3 files. The ne ...

(

Kazaa Kazaa Media Desktop ( ) (once stylized as "KaZaA", but later usually written "Kazaa") was a peer-to-peer file sharing application using the FastTrack protocol licensed by Joltid Ltd. and operated as Kazaa by Sharman Networks. Kazaa was subsequ ...

) **

eDonkey network The eDonkey Network (also known as the eDonkey2000 network or eD2k) is a decentralized, mostly server-based, peer-to-peer file-sharing network created in 2000 by US developers Jed McCaleb and Sam Yagan that is best suited to share big files ...

(with Overnet and

Kad network The Kad network is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network which implements the Kademlia P2P overlay protocol. The majority of users on the Kad Network are also connected to servers on the eDonkey network, and Kad Network clients typically query known node ...

) **

BitTorrent BitTorrent is a Protocol (computing), communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a Decentralised system, decentralized manner. The protocol is d ...

(with

Mainline DHT Mainline DHT is the name given to the Kademlia-based distributed hash table (DHT) used by Comparison of BitTorrent clients, BitTorrent clients to find peers via the BitTorrent protocol. The idea of using a DHT for distributed tracking in BitTorrent ...

) ** Direct Connect **

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

* Multiple control interfaces: telnet, web interface, third party GUIs. Written in the

programming language and licensed under the GPL-2.0-or-later license, the application separates the user interface (which can be a

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

, or a third-party GUI application) and the code that interacts with the peer-to-peer networks. MLDonkey is able to connect simultaneously to different peers using different network protocols. In addition it can download and merge parts of one file from different network protocols although this feature is currently documented as experimental. MLDonkey runs in a terminal session and does not require a GUI environment, saving memory and processing resources. Behavior is controlled by editable

configuration file A configuration file, a.k.a. config file, is a computer file, file that stores computer data, data used to configure a software system such as an application software, application, a server (computing), server or an operating system. Some applic ...

s, or—in a more user friendly fashion—from a separate user interface. From release 2.9.0 (2007) on, support for

gnutella Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model. In June 2005, Gnutella's population was 1.81 million computer ...

and G2 are no longer compiled in by default as both plugins are buggy and currently unmaintained; however, it is still possible to compile them in by making the appropriate setting in the configuration file.

Frontends

* P2P-GUI (web interface) * Onager (Palm OS) * Sancho * MuleDroid - Interface Android

References

General references *

External links

* {{File sharing 2001 software BitTorrent clients for Linux Cross-platform software DC clients for Linux EDonkey Clients for Linux File sharing software Free BitTorrent clients Free file sharing software Free software programmed in C Free software programmed in OCaml

History

Features

Frontends

See also

References

External links