The following situation is unfolding in my brain. The network is gaining strength. The people in the forum love it and are ready to wait for all their vaults to connect to it. And suddenly we become popular.
10,000 new registrations. How can I be a farmer? How can I be a farmer? You start a vault and wait and wait and wait. Boom appears a new network and says here you do not wait. Come on.
The question is, do we as a community want these first new networks to be ours, or will we leave them to some random individual with unknown intentions?
If your original decentralized network is as perfect as you say it is, no one will want to create another network.
There will be lots of disagreements about how to structure the network. The best solution will be to create all the networks and let them compete.
Any other solution is unequal.
I wonder “completes with” tempts ye olde dull black and white of normal conflict… better is “compliments to” a robust whole… minor differences cf natural difference in any species, removes liability to single point failure.
If the grey goo that is data storage is common, then whatever layers there are can compete… the more resources that are shared the stronger the raw basic is. There’s a point at which fragmenting makes everyone weaker, where the better option is to see an environment that can be for Everyone.
I’d suggest any network that cannot accommodate Everyone, is not as good as it can be. So, we struggle now to imagine the variety of what might become possible - what there is now is very base and forking for the sake of it, makes no sense to me until there is a difference at a higher layer. What is base is like the stage on which everyone can play their games… the physics. Obviously more interesting is the psychology and philosophy but its also distinct.
Different people play different games but the reality they share is common…
Isn’t the main challenge being able to add improvements to the network after launch and having the full understanding on how the code was built? Don’t you need a solid team like Maidsafe has?
I don’t think it is a matter of just forking the network and becoming the next ‘better’ Safe Network, you’ll need another David Irvine + Team.
Very complicated and I think we should let forking up to whatever copy cat out there, because they will surely fail.
Indeed.
The updates will be crucial, but with open source they can be copied across.
I will never farm another network, unless I can maybe throw spare resource at it and cash out fast.
But that resource would probably be better spent farming the original.
An important clarification is that I personally do not want forks. I just think they are inevitable.
So my goal was for this topic to help us decide if we want to be involved in guiding the development of forks (or at least their initial development) + whether there is something that can be included in the design that is useful in a world with a lot of SAFE networks
I hope Maidsafe will be involved in all the early network(s) even enforcing the patents they have if necessary. Aside from private/local incarnations why would the world need multiple internets? I think a good comparison is Twitter. How many incarnations of Twitter does society need? Maybe more than one if there were different levels of censorship/filtering applied. Maybe “normal” Twitter, plus a sanitized kids version plus maybe a completely uncensored version. But 10,000… why? Maybe a better question is how many different internet protocols does a society need?
My point is that if we just throw the final network selection to the wild why would we not end up with a Dogecoin situation? I mean, someone could come along, spawn a version of the network that is essentially the same as the others, then market the hell out of it with a catchy logo. There’s no reason they would need to honor MAID as a token or even uphold any of the values Maidsafe holds dear. Google or FB could do this in no time and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Maidsafe were on their radar for this very purpose. It seems to me that we want one network at a time, not many, and Maidsafe will need to be a bit protectionist if they want the network to be free/open as well as to protect their investors. I would favor launching the network when it is “good enough” as a single entity, market it to an extreme degree, and focus on improving, improving, improving it. I think the only way the network succeeds in meeting all its goals is for Maidsafe to leverage its influence on the initial incarnation and try to attract critical mass to that incarnation. Otherwise a Doge will come along and take away all Maidsafe’s hard work.
All SAFE Network and MaidSafe code is made available under GPLv3, BSD or MIT license
The GNU General Public License ( GNU GPL or GPL ) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, and modify the software.
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software
If your question is can you take the vault software, put your configuration file in it and make your own SAFE network with your own safecoin, the answer is that you can.
I believe many patents have been filed that should protect the Safe Network code in certain ways. Although I am not sure about what parts specifically are patented.
Can protect MaidSafe. The SAFE Network is a different thing. One is a company that we all love and we want all its employees and its creator to be rewarded as much as possible for their work. The other is a public good that belongs to all humanity…
It would be great if David could jump in here and give his take on how he plans to protect the network from ‘pirates’ forking the network and walking away with it, like JohnM mentioned in his post.
MaidSafe has patents in place regarding the technology upon which the SAFE Network is/will be built. However, the licenses are such that anyone can fork the code.
More specifically, the MaidSafe Foundation (rather than MaidSafe the company) holds the patents. The parents are meant to prevent others from claiming rights to and therefore preventing others from using the technology.
MaidSafe leverages a combination of MIT/BSD and GPL licenses because…
To be more specific:
Generally speaking, filed IP protections like trademarks, patents and copyrights (unlike trade secrets) can only do so much because you have to publish the “art”. That allows people to reverse engineer/engineer around a solution. Truly sustainable competitive advantages come from product quality, processes and operations.
Maybe getting the creator of the first Internet to endorse Maidsafe (like he in a way sort of did with his “Solid” partnering, some time ago, whether or not that’s still happening) could solve some issues with efficiency+speed. It’d be cool to use the one that everyone is using—Maidsafe’s and Tim Berners-Lee’s—not some greedy corporation’s version. Also, if the largest one is supposed to be the most secure, people will want to use that one. Touting the very fact of that repetitiously would be a good way to ingrain it in people’s minds regardless of knowing how it all works.
