Hi,
This is KaKaRoTo from the aMSN team. Square87 sent me this link.
First, I'd like to say that I know Patchou a little as I've read many of his posts on different forums, and I'd like to say that you're a nice guy
But I also think that the way 'MeEtc' and 'Jesus' answered was rather rude. Although I can understand you getting annoyed by some user's posts, I think that you could be a little more patient before breaking loose your rudeness.
About this emotisounds issue, I fully understand the problem Patchou described, and I can understand why he wouldn't like us to access the database (I actually didn't know anything about the database).
The thing that square87 asked is whether we *can* with Patchou's permission use those emotisounds, and you should be thankful for him asking such a question, because as far as I know, it's all about sending text and there's no copyright in that.
It does cost you a lot and you don't want non-plus! users to access the DB but it also costs a lot to Microsoft to maintain their MSN servers and they probably don't want any third party client to access their server either, but as far as I know, nothing can prevent us from doing so.
That said, I'm glad square87 pointed me here, so now I know that there is a sound database, that the server is owned by Patchou, that it costs him money and that he doesn't give us permission to use that database, and knowing that, I can promise you that I will not authorize any aMSN plugin to access your database, and that is a decision I take, entirely based on the respect I have for you and for your work.
Now, to continue with what square87 asked, is there a way to make this work, I'm talking here about a compromise, something to make aMSN interact with Messenger Plus! as this will be an added bonus for both of us. As you may know, aMSN has had over 12.5 millions of downloads over the last 5 years and is currently holding up with more than 400 000 downloads a day, it's a pretty popular client. And as we know, Messenger Plus! is a 'must have' plugin for MSN, I don't know the stats, but I'm sure you also have impressive stats. If we can work together to find a solution that would be profitable to both of us, making aMSN interoperable with Messenger Plus! would be a great thing.
We could developer our own plugin with our own system, and we'd have no interoperability with Messenger Plus! and we won't bother Patchou's database, and everyone will be happy, but I think that's it's such a waste not to share our efforts into one standard solution.
Please, do not understand this as being a "please, please, grant us permission to use your database so we'd be compatible", on the contrary, I think that the idea of a central repository of sounds is good, but that it's a bad move because of all this bandwidth issue (+if server goes down, users are affected, etc...). I have no idea how much money you get from Messenger Plus! and I do not need to know as this is none of my business, but if you say that it costs you a lot, I think that it would be wise to change your implementation.
To benefit you, I wouldn't accept it even if you agreed to let us use the database because I think that it's not the optimal solution. If you want my help, please say so, and I would be glad to share my mind with you in order to brainstorm and engineer a solution that would be not only profitable to your users (or our users) but also profitable to you, allowing you to minimize or remove any of that bandwidth use for emotisounds.
I'm thinking of a protocol similar to the one used by MSN itself (I don't know if you're aware of the protocol specifics since you hook the original client itself, you don't need to reimplement the protocol lib). we could use an MSNP2P to send the sound. Square87 talked about sending it through a voice clip, and he suggested it to make it not use your bandwidth, I think it's a good starting point, but we should try to make something more 'hidden' than a voice clip. You could send either messages with a Content-Type of x-msmsgs-plus-plugin or something, those will be ignored by MSN, so they won't affect the chat, but maybe you can grab those messages and parse them yourself and extract the info you want, like maybe sending the sound encoded with the voice clip codec (siren7, I implemented an open source version of it, compression ratio is 16:1). You can also send it through a datacast message (used to notify of voice clips and nudges, etc...) with special datacast ID and Data fields.
You could keep your central sound repository for when users want to download new sounds to their PC but when sending a sound from one user to another, let the user downloading the sound download it directly from his contact than from your server, this will probably lower the bandwidth a lot for you. Of course, this would use a system to cache the sounds, etc...
Anyways, if you're interested, tell me, and we'll talk about it.
Take care,
KaKaRoTo
