AllPeers has always had a close relationship with the open source world due to its use of the Mozilla platform. Although we are a commercial company, we feel that open sourcing AllPeers is the right thing to do, for both altruistic and self-serving reasons.
On the altruistic side, we’ve gained a lot from use of open source products. Besides Mozilla, we use Boost, FreeImage, libavcodec/libavformat and libxml2. So naturally we feel a strong inclination to give something back by making our own source code available. Since our product is free anyway, there isn’t any compelling reason for us not to do so. Note, however, that we are only opening up the client side of our product. Our various server-side modules will remain closed source since our network depends on having a single, stable instance of this servers.
On the self-serving side, we’re hoping that some of you will decide to get involved in our development community and help us achieve the full potential of AllPeers. We’ve made a major effort to design AllPeers as a platform that can be easily extended. We’re not expecting people to start hacking our core modules right off the bat, but there are a number of things that outside developers can do to contribute:
We’re also hoping that people will go ahead and use our libraries (database/resource management, P2P networking, etc.) in their own Mozilla-based applications.
We don’t have as much documentation as we would like, but we’ll be working hard to extend this site with all the information you need to hack AllPeers. If you need help, feel free to visit us in our IRC channel at irc://irc.mozilla.org/allpeers if you have questions.