xMule

» see xmule.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

eDonkey was how you got things in Turkey that no shop here carried. Around 2004 and 2005 that network, and eMule as the client everyone actually ran, was on a large share of the machines I sat in front of, chewing through a TTNet line for days at a time to finish one file. eMule was a Windows program built on Microsoft's own class library, which meant that for anyone on Linux the whole network was simply out of reach. xMule existed to close that gap.

The chain went like this. Someone ported eMule to Linux and called it lMule. In june 2003 the developers fell out, one contributor took control of the lMule website, and the project forked into xMule. The rewrite dropped the Microsoft foundation classes for wxWidgets, which is a toolkit that compiles against whatever windowing system is present, so the same code could target Linux and the BSDs with Windows and the Mac stated as intentions. It was C++ under the GPL, and for a stretch it was the only serious way onto eDonkey without a Microsoft license.

Then it forked again, six weeks later, and that second split is the one that decided everything. By the time the dust settled aMule had the momentum and xMule had the name, and the two projects were describing each other in their own documentation with language that does not usually survive into an encyclopedia. aMule's site said relations between the two were in a rather sorry state. xMule's said aMule was for present-day end users while xMule cared about long-term viability, and compared the difference to Internet Explorer against Mozilla, which in 2003 was not a flattering comparison to draw about your rival.

I never ran it. My eDonkey years were Windows years, and the client I had was eMule with the queue window open overnight. But I remember the shape of the thing exactly: an estimated time that only ever went up, and a directory of half-finished parts you could not bring yourself to delete. xMule was that same experience for people who had chosen a harder operating system, which in 2004 was most of the people I would later work with.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the subpoena ~

On 17 august 2003 the maintainer of record, listed everywhere as Ted R. Smith and living in the United States at the time, lost their home internet connection over their role in developing xMule. The reporting from the period says a subpoena was issued on behalf of the RIAA under the DMCA. This was the summer the RIAA's mass campaign against individuals started, and the notable thing here is who it reached: not somebody sharing files, but somebody writing the software.

The next day, 18 august, aMule forked off the xMule source. Whether that was the direct consequence or just the moment the existing disagreements found a reason, the two events are one day apart and everything after follows from them. A legal threat aimed at one person effectively decided which of two nearly identical clients the Linux world would use for the next twenty years.

~ the years without a release ~

xMule kept releasing for another three years. The last was 1.13.7 RC1 in september 2006, and after that the project simply did not ship anything, which on the internet is a slower and more common death than a shutdown announcement. The site and its forums stayed up and the downloads kept working, and nothing new ever arrived.

The formal end came on 18 january 2009, when Avi Vahl posted a note on xmule.org announcing that development was over. The reasoning was blunt and, from this distance, correct: eMule was dead and the future of peer to peer was BitTorrent, so anyone still here should switch protocols or move to aMule. Very few dying projects tell you to go use the fork that beat them.

~ what remains ~

aMule is still maintained. It still speaks eDonkey and Kademlia on every platform it ever targeted, and it descends line by line from a codebase forked out of another fork during one bad summer. The tree that produced it is mostly stumps now: eDonkey2000 itself was shut down under legal pressure in 2006, and lMule and xMule are both gone, so the survivor is the branch that was cut off in the argument.

The other thing left behind is the reminder of who the copyright fight actually touched. The story people tell about that era is about the lawsuits against downloaders, tens of thousands of them, mostly settled for a few thousand dollars each. The quieter version is a volunteer working on a Linux client having their connection cut, and a project changing hands the following day because of it.

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