MLDonkey

Template:Infobox Software MLDonkey is an open source, free software multi-network peer-to-peer application. It is also the name of the peer-to-peer overlay network that the MLDonkey uses. Originally a Linux client for the eDonkey protocol, it now runs on many flavors of Unix-like, Mac OS X, Windows and MorphOS and supports numerous peer-to-peer protocols. It is written in Objective Caml, with some C and even some Assembly parts.

History[edit | edit source]

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

Features[edit | edit source]

Features of MLdonkey core:

Peer to peer (p2p) program that supports the following network protocols, either partially or completely:
- eDonkey network
- Overnet
- BitTorrent
- FastTrack
- Kad Network
- OpenNap (currently broken)
- SoulSeek (currently broken)
- DirectConnect - As many users of the MLDonkey client (mldc) choose to report inflated share sizes, mldc is not welcome to many DC hubs, and violates the common "no fake shares" rule. (recently fixed)
- HTTP/FTP
Controlled by Telnet, Web interface or various GUIs

From release 2.9.0 on, support for Gnutella and G2 are no longer compiled in by default; however, it is still possible to compile it in by making the appropriate setting in the configuration file^[1].

Written in the Ocaml programming language and licensed under the GPL, the application separates the user interface (which can be a web browser, telnet, or a third-party GUI application) and the code that interacts with the peer-to-peer networks.

MLDonkey is able to connect to different networks simultaneously and it's also able to download one file from several networks at the same moment. MLDonkey runs in a terminal session and does not require a GUI environment, saving memory and processing resources. Everything is controlled by editable ini-files, or in a more user friendly fashion through the use of separate user interfaces (local or remote).