LICENSING: Are you dead set on GPL3?

Marketing
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Gubatron wrote;

   GPL won't protect anyone from IP theft, the code is already public and 
    if a bad actor wants to use the technology and hide it, they'll be able 
    to do so if they really want to.

This is fear mongering and demonstratively false; you should really do your homework before essentially stating that you can’t use the law to protect your interests, while asking someone else to please change the license to allow you to not break the law… Thats just dishonest behavior.

There are big lawfirms that protect GPL and free software projects for free, no cost. There are a shit load of cases where the GPL has bene enforced in court. Again, do your homework.

Sounds to me that OpenBazaars founders want to create their own company some time in the near future and take the code that volunteers created closed and benefit of the proceeds. Just that pesky GPL is in their way :wink:

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This link from that discussion is interesting as well and does seem relatively balanced http://torquemag.io/youve-been-gpld/

P.S I do not think OB is looking to unfairly exploit this codebase, but you have a point, it puts the codebase in a position to be exploited without retribution to the community who put in the effort, whereas gpl does not prevent better implementations and forks, but it does force an honesty, I can see that. Licensing gets very personal very fast, but in this case I feel this is an honest enquiry and debate, I am super trusting though :wink:

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Some good points in there

So, in short, before the re-license a company profiting by using your open source code is fully allowed to do so. But its not a free ride, they can’t just take and not give back, GPL means you share your changes.

GPL is great at building an ecosystem because those that steal your code and build on top of it are expanding the ecosystem.
MIT is not so great since it has the opposite effect, people tend to fork it and you never hear from them again. The effect almost always is that they make changes that make them a competitor instead of a benefit to the ecosystem.

Bottom line; GPL is a legal document written by lawyers to give the people that contributed code a set of rights. The MIT license doesn’t give you any rights.

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Hey I don’t know much about licensing contracts, so maybe someone can enlighten me but is there anything stopping Maidsafe from using GPL for their standard, free anyone can fork it license, but still issuing separate discreet licenses to those who for whatever reason need a different more monetized approach?

Basically if you want to enjoy the benefits of open source, then you have to give open source and if you don’t well contact maidsafe and negotiate a license in a non open source manner.

Maybe that’s oversimplifying?

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No thats pretty much it for now. Free to fork and compete in an open source world, but not to steal and close up for nobody to see :slight_smile: Its still not perfect but probably not to far away either.

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@zander_32:
but the amount of cases where it’s been enforced it’s probably about 0.000001%

Have you heard of this magical place called China? In there it doesn’t matter if you have closed and obfuscated your code, if they want it, they reverse engineer it, and outperform you, and good luck on going after them.

I’m not trying to have the license changed so I don’t break the law, that’s your assumption, I’m trying to get the license changed so that this can be used.

The reality is that this is not the only effort to create a decentralized toolset, and if it closes itself with innapropiate licensensing it will be destined to lose to a competitor. It’s just being realistic.

The GPL is great for certain use cases, not for protocols and their canonical implementations.

If there are tools Maidsafe wants to build in the open and force others to be open, they should do it, but leave the foundations truly open. Maidsafe will be the top vendor on Maidsafe based tech.

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@kirkion only that things aren’t that black and white.

In our case, we are also an open source project, and we don’t have an issue with our code being open, however, we want OpenBazaar to be adopted by both Open source developers and closed source developers since we want to create a standard for decentralized Smart Contract transactions. If you use the GPL, there’s no way players with clout in the ecommerce world will join us, if they use OpenBazaar we see that as a win. As for making money, we don’t intend to make money on the OpenBazaar technology, but I’m sure many people will be able to build technology to complement it and they might want to keep a competitive edge by closing some of it. There’s a space for both open and closed source when you go with something like MIT License, or Public domain licenses. It’s truly free software.

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This is great news; though the point is obviously clear to me:
That if it is possible to make a closed source application is to reduce the advancement of humanity by creating a delay in the open source implementation of that software. This is easily preventing advancement of humanity, and rather empowers some for such a short period of time. If the more interesting projects of the planet were empowering and those ones which are open to the planet in every way shape and form, this incurs that the designers of software will be equally benevolent as the originator.

Since ditigal contracts are only recently becoming an obvious thing, and the advancements in decentralized technologies have allowed to make openly available to each person access to mathematical algorithm for transactions of financial data. A good example is Ethereum where each ‘smart contract’ is an open source program. Things that handle finances ought be open source and ultra secure.

What is one example of an entity that will use open bazaar and require a proprietary algorithm to be closed to the planet?

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@dallyshalla I could literally be writing for hours examples of business models on top of openbazaar that would benefit everyone even if they were closed source implementations.

The most powerful one I believe will be an OpenBazaar based engine, so that users without having to install openbazaar can search the network, get curated results, search engine would have a very high clickthrough rate on sponsored listings, an Alibaba-killer possibly worth billions of dollars, certainly won’t open its source.

Search is not a trivial problem to solve, even harder if you’re searching a p2p network.

The builders of OpenBazaar search engines will have to compete, but they will find issues in the protocol and provide ways to avoid network spam, dishonest search results, nodes that will not want to forward their competitors listings, etc., at some point they’ll have to contribute back improvements to the foundation, but all their search technology I have no problem if it remains closed.

There could be for example enterprise implementations of openbazaar to run on thousands of nodes owned by a single company in the cloud. Implementing this stuff isn’t trivial nor cheap, and it will be sold for top dollar to ecommerce giants out there (if OpenBazaar is to catch on as a major force in the ecommerce world, the likes of Wallmart won’t have the luxury to be excluded from this market place, and they won’t want to use the client that’s meant to run on a pc, they’ll need to integrate with all of their processes, and a lot of that just can’t be open)

Other examples might be lots of closed source OpenBazaar clients with better features, for instance someone could create a vertical client destined to kill p2p ride sharing services like Uber or Lyft.

Market places for reputable notaries, buyers and sellers implementing closed source trust mechanisms…

The business applications of OpenBazaar are endless as we’re doing contracts, you can’t believe in the fallacy of forcing everyone to be open, that’s not freedom in my opinion, and forcing people to act in a certain way is never good (kind of reminds me of Castro communism now spreading over latin america and destroying everything by forcing big government lousy control of every aspect of life and not letting people have the freedoms to solve problems with free market solutions)

I think we win if we invite the closed source world to join, if we all use the same underlying technology we have no choice but to contribute back for it to advance.

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@gubatron, I’m not trying to make it black and white. From my perspective posing a stark choice between GPL and MIT license, thats trying to make it black and white.

Maidsafe is offering a license under the terms of the GPL. If someone doesn’t like the terms of the GPL, Maidsafe retains the ability to create and offer other licenses under different terms.

If you have a compelling use-case that requires the ability to close-source some things in order for your platform to work, then the fact that Maidsafe has GPL as a default doesn’t prevent you from coming to them and negotiating a different license under terms acceptable to you. So to continue the metaphor, having GPL as one of their licenses doesn’t prevent you or anyone else from negotiating other licenses in any shade of grey or any color of the rainbow.

It sounds like Maidsafe and OpenBazaar have a lot in common, and might very well want to negotiate a specific license that would allow you to assure businesses that the GPL virus provisions will not affect them, at least so long as they stay within the terms of the license chain between Maidsafe, OpenBazaar and them.

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Would it? We’re decentralizing the net. Business models would likely have to change anyway. The very notion of ownership will very likely change. Moreover while the Maidsafe Foundation might be a “company” the safe technology itself isn’t. Just look at how many companies have sprung up using linux and it’s free software using the GPL. Are you saying the internet can’t use the same business model as Cannicol?

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@gubatron

The business applications of OpenBazaar are endless as we’re doing
contracts, you can’t believe in the fallacy of forcing everyone to be
open, that’s not freedom in my opinion,

You made this argument various times, so I’m wondering if you really don’t know the difference between the protocol and the default implementation.

Choosing a license will only affect the implementation. It will have zero effect on how the protocol can be used. So if you get smart and start using GPL in openbazaar, you are in no way forcing everyone to open. This is a lie that I would love you to stop repeating.

If OB is GPL, its perfect Ok for a company to come and do a C++ implementation in whatever license they want. Including closed source. That application will work just fine with any other OB node. More direct; you don’t have the power to tell them what to do.

So stop using the excuse of wanting an open ecosystem as something to hide behind and not use GPL. If you want a big community then history has shown you should use GPL and not the MIT license.

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I’m not suggesting what license or business model the new Internet should use. I’m making the point that whatever license is chosen, and there are clearly a number of things to consider, it should be extremely well considered and not based on the view or opinions or 1 organisation.

The MaidSafe Foundation is a charity by the way :smile:.

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To be frank it would please me greatly if close source software became a thing of the past. And who said anything about force? Frankly I’m not sure what OpenBazzar’s issue is. Aren’t they an open source platform? What do they have their tail in a twist about in the first place? The only people that the safe network’s liscence will affect are those that want to fork the safe network, and in essence create their own internet. If they do that I do believe they should be open source and if they don’t like it they can write their own competing decentralized anonymous encrypted internet 2.0 from scratch. Remember what the four freedoms of free software are.

A program is free software if the program’s users have the
four essential freedoms:

The freedom to run the program as you wish,
for any purpose (freedom 0).The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it
does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source
code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
(freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions
to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole
community a chance to benefit from your changes.
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Freedom 3 includes the freedom to release your modified versions
as free software. A free license may also permit other ways of
releasing them; in other words, it does not have to be
a copyleft license. However, a
license that requires modified versions to be nonfree does not qualify
as a free license.

The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person
or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of
overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it
with the developer or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is
the user’s purpose that matters, not the developer’s
purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes,
and if you distribute it to someone else, she is then free to run it
for her purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on her.

Would be relavent quotes and issues for this dissucusion I think. I don’t think the SAFE network has any business telling anyone how they can or can’t use the software, i.e. inpinging on our freedoms as end users.

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Don’t forfeit your rights maidsafe team. You’ve worked hard and are already giving the world this amazing free gift because you believe along with the rest of us that what it achieves is a basic right. Like @kirkion I’m no licensing lawyer. I do think OB and maidsafe could have a wonderfully symbiotic relationship BUT I would hope that dealing special licenses exclusively wouldn’t tarnish maidsafes reputation through association although I do know OB is working hard to market as generic of a marketplace as possible.

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Agreed. I think SAFE should stay GPL3 and if OB don’t like it they can stay on the regular internet and go out of business along with Facebook and Google. it’s not like we can’t create an open bazaar clone on maidsafe natively.

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By and large it’s not. The GPL allows you to sell your fork of the safe network, it just doesn’t allow you to close the software. Are you honestly telling me you would want to have a closed source version of the SAFE network running around? Are you telling me you’d trust such a piece of software or the company that created it or used it? Imagine Microsoft forked SAFE and included it in a new version of Windows, would you REALLY want it to be closed source, what with their history of putting back doors in things and sending info to the gov’t? What about if Google did it and used it for data mining? And God help us if the government created their own closed source fork! You honestly think such things would be a GOOD idea?

One of the prime purposes behind SAFE is to create competition through forking code. Allowing for closed source software prevents that by creating artificial scarcity. It prevents new developers from forking code and creating modified versions and therefore stops growth all in the name of creating “exclusivity.”

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Sigh…I’m aware of what the GPL allows and doesn’t allow, I was fairly involved in deciding which license we chose. You seem to be arguing with me and I’m not disagreeing with you. To re iterate my point: “We need to build on a license that is going to best serve the interests of the network, community and the world’s Internet users.”

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@zander_32

You made this argument various times, so I’m wondering if you really don’t know the difference between the protocol and the default implementation.

It’s not like OpenBazaar will stop working on its core issues to say: “Ok, let’s re-implement all of maidsafe protocols from scratch and license our implementation under MIT”, we’re not in the business of creating what maidsafe has been working on for years, we’d like to use the law of accelerating returns just the way we’ve been able to integrate other open source technologies and contribute back to them whenever we need to.

you sound like a GPL fundamentalist, I think there’s no point answering anymore. Good luck living in your fantasy world where you want to share but not really.

(and I’m pretty aware of what the GPL is, I work for other OpenSource projects that have been contaminated by it, never again if I start something from scratch)

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do you realize that even if it’s GPL, they can still do that… the problem is that as of now, with the GPL you are pushing away the good actors that may also be Open Sourced, but not under such a restrictive license. It’s about license compatibility and choice.

It’s a p2p network, anyone can connect and figure out ways to data mine.