LICENSING: Are you dead set on GPL3?

Marketing
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Ok, as I said above I think he does make a good argument for his specific use-case and for other B2B use cases. However, for other use-cases, individual use, political activism, autonomous DAOs, the viral open-source provisions are in my mind beneficial. Additionally, the GPL license has the advantage of allowing free use by end-users, but still providing powerful incentives for the large corps to be subject to the defensive provisions. Again, nothing stops these corps from coming to Maidsafe and negotiating a license which allows them to use, without opening up their source, but still allows Maidsafe to protect its interests.

In my opinion the GPL is a good default provision for these two features, it allows effectively free use by the optimal end-users but it retains defensive properties against large players who could pose a threat to the network. This is because in my view the great value of the network is that it allows smaller players to contribute and create a viable network without needing the larger players.

So if question is whether the B2B use-case or set of use-cases is so strong, and so vital to the success of the network that the default position of Maidsafe should be changed, I don’t believe it is. One of the fundamental points of maidsafe, is that as a whole it DOESN’T need to attract and get buy-in from the big players to be viable and successful.

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@kirkion I just stopped because debating licensing reminds me of debating religion, it’s never ending, my goal I feel has been accomplished which is to bring this to the attention of the Maidsafe stakeholders.

Thanks for your request, I truly wish I could stick around with Maidsafe, I love what you guys did with the build system, tests, all the papers are amazing, you seem to live and breathe p2p technologies and have very ambitious goals which I’d like to be part of, but as of now this will have to be outside the context of OpenBazaar on some other GPL project (perhaps FrostWire, which is Licensed under GPL3 :slight_smile: )

Cheers

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Sure, ideas are free, I’d love nothing more for something like OpenBazaar to exist, be it implemented by me or somebody else, we need to have decentralized market places, and I hope OpenBazaar will help birth many forks, competition is good, it only validates what you’re doing and makes things better for everyone.

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I’ll try not to feed further trolls and remain a good friend, this project is really awesome.

Peace :smile:

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Thank you…probably earned ‘fire ant’ badge for that, together with ‘troll’ and possibly ‘pot stirrer’ also, that’s pretty efficient for one thread :blush:

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cheers mate :smile:

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I don’t intend to start another debate here, but I do have a question that I don’t recall seeing addressed elsewhere. Is there a specific reason that the GPLv3 was chosen over the AGPLv3 for MaidSafe?

I only have basic familiarity with software licenses, but since the AGPL is commonly recommended for software which is meant to be run over a network (according to the FSF, at least) this would naturally seem to include MaidSafe. (If I’m correct, it was also the AGPL that OpenBazaar had been licensed under before switching to MIT.)

Is there something in the AGPL that was considered risky, or not a good match for MaidSafe in some way? Or perhaps I am simply misunderstanding something about the appropriateness of the AGPL license. Regardless, it’s something I’ve been curious about for a number of weeks now.

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It’s a good question and I don’t think you have mis understood the license at all. As I understand it AGPL and GPL are largely identical except for 1 clause (13) that is designed to prevent a developer taking the code in question and running it on their own servers and never releasing a copy and therefore the community doesn’t benefit from their changes. The AGPL license legally obligates that developer to make their amended code available.

The SAFE Network doesn’t use servers as we currently know them, and is designed to link together nodes on a global network. To enable the SAFE to run only in a local environment would be to severely limit the capability of the network and our IP would restrict the network being significantly altered to run in a corporate environment, with managed network access for example.

However, it is a good point that you raise @SilasB and maybe the additional protection would be a prudent belt and braces approach. I’ll give it some thought.

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While questioning Aral Balkan’s use of Thunderclap to promote his Ind.ie privacy project I came across the following, very relevant to this thread:

“When we work on our projects, however, we should make sure to release them under free software licenses (not open source) so that spyware companies and other closed silos cannot take them, close them off, invest huge sums of money to improve them, and then decline to share those future improvements.” - Aral Balkan - Spyware v Spyware

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The BSD guys are generally happy with Apple. It enormously expanded their user base, and Apple have been good at returning bug fixes. It could be much better of course, but it could be worse too.

As an example of how worse it could be, Microsoft lifted the BSD 4.4 networking stack for NT and never gave a thing in return. They wrote their own for Vista, still that’s the norm for BSD, people take and don’t give anything back.

BSD is also not short of cash, at least not in aggregate - if anything this has been a golden decade for them since they stopped getting sued for copyright theft. They do lack cash in speciifc areas especially consumer device driver support. If you don’t mind staying a good few years behind state of the art hardware, and pick devices carefully, you can make do very well. My four year old laptop, for example, has flawless support on BSD apart from the too-new Wifi card I upgraded to (I wanted 5Ghz support) and the Intel Wifi driver on BSD is literally a single guy who gets round to it from time to time. But you don’t want to go any newer than Ivy Bridge hardware right now, Haswell support is still patchy as Ivy Bridge is where server hardware still lives.

It’s a funny thing actually - for some big iron server components BSD driver support is way ahead of Linux and equal to Windows Server. It helps hugely that big customers like banks and the US government won’t even consider buying any component without first tier BSD driver support, and those customers don’t really care about Linux support the same way. So for those type of pricey component, Linux is the one needing more cash :slight_smile:

Niall

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@janitor If the OB rep that came on this site was representative it won’t be the end of anything. SAFE could be the end but not that compromised mess. If someone has a suck up system of ethics and world view you can’t expect an honest product. Anyone with such a low opinion of open source is part of the problem not the solution. Everything about his presentation screamed he’d sell out to the highest bidder. Is that who you want to architect your solution?

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You’re taking this off topic with that comment…

I remembered when that thread by that OB dude was just posted and had 2 comments - I had no clue that it went so out of control. I read just first 4-5 of this replies before I gave up and to be honest he’s more right than wrong - OB is P2P software, and as such it must be distributed, which means anyone who makes any modification to OB should (or is at risk of having to) open their source, so anyone who wants to develop OB plugins and such clearly wouldn’t like that risk.

But regardless, the type of license used doesn’t mean the software can or cannot accomplish that. If that were true what would be the answer for dual-license software that’s licensed depending on whether one uses it for commercial or non-commercial purpose? It’s simply not relevant.

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Why would anybody in a darknet context trust something that wasn’t open sourced for review and scrutiny. Its insane, doubly so in a darknet context where a dev’s professed highest value is money. In a way this was Richard David Steel’s fight with spy agencies. He was in essence telling them that their closed approach didn’t work anymore.

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Well, I’m not sure what’s your point. OB is released under the MIT License.
And where can you find more about the closed approach of the MIT License? That’s right - go to OpenSource dot net dot com dot org where you can read all about it.

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This is out of context because this stuff was moved form one thread to another.

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I don’t see how the AGPL would restrict anyone to run a node only on a local network?
It would require people who run nodes with modified MaidSafe code (though not independent implementations) to release their code, yes, but it does not force anyone off the public network as long as they are willing to publish their modifications.

Which seems more in spirit with the choice of a GPL in general, whether you agree with that or not, and shouldn’t really drive anyone away either, since nodes on the same network really shouldn’t be doing anything too differently, and private business logic is more likely to be in separate applications that interface with the node.

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True I agree but this doesn’t really address their ability to choose such a stupid option. Declaring yourself a gay transexual, polyamorous, voodoo worshiping (insert random pagan flavor of choice), anarchist, while dressing in an exotic manner, with notions to change the world and trying to open a sacred sexuality counseling business in a conservative, monogamous, very traditional, predominantly hardcore Christian, neighbourhood, would be just stupid. You’re free to do it but it’s political and economic suicide. You’re more likely to get run out of town than to get customers. But you’re STILL FREE TO DO IT.

This is similar to stating why would someone create a business in an environment where it is obviously going to be rejected? Well I don’t know but that doesn’t really address the question of the GPL or any liscence. A liscence is not about why would someone create a business or exhibit a behavior that would obviously be considered anticulture or antisocial but rather about declaring that the one declaring the liscence finds that behaviour to be unacceptable and is exerting political and legal force against it. If one uses the GPL then one is not concerned with WHY one might want to close source their content, be it anticulture or not, be it trusted by someone or not, because they simply find closed source to be unacceptable and do not want their software being used in that manner. Likewise if one is copywriting one is again not considering why one might want it open but is again using force and making a political, legal and personal decision about their own stuff. Now ultimately one can consider why one might use said software before one chooses a lisence but ultimately that’s the crux of it: liscenses are poltical and legal means of force. The law by it’s very nature is coercive.

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Yes you are correct, it only obligates them to release their changes. AGPL is interesting and something we’ll be looking at. Thanks for the input @niklas!

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I moved a post to a new topic: TelelinkGlobal

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This has been an interesting (and heated) topic to read. It seems David is set on GPL for now, but just thought I’d throw in my two satoshis here.

For the most part, it seems the argument boils down to “should we let companies use the code for their purposes without contributing back, or make everyone open source their forks to keep everything open and free.” If we really dissect this argument, it seems to me that what it’s really saying is: should we let people steal our code without contributing back?

The GPL side of the argument sounds like “we worked really hard on it, so people shouldn’t profit off of our work.” This argument is about I, me, and mine, not about what is best for everyone. With MIT, it’s “let everyone use it for their own purposes.” Maybe they’ll contribute back (as they want their own source improved, too), but maybe not.

Since the whole point of MaidSafe is a trustless, decentralized internet, I think it is extremely unlikely that there will be a successful closed-source fork that overtakes MaidSafe and takes away their business, so we can rule that out. What is left is just the desire to not let other profit off of our work, which is in opposition to @nicklambert’s statement: “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.” The goal is not “don’t let others profit from our work”. Will it really affect you substantially if you let others profit from it? Will it diminish you in any way, except the ego telling you that you have been stolen from?

I think it’s a very strong indication that before MaidSafe is even out, there is already a project (OpenBazaar) that will not use MaidSafe due to its licensing. Indeed, if OpenBazaar, an MIT licensed project, cannot use MaidSafe, then how many more projects and companies are going to search for alternatives in the future when MaidSafe actually comes out?

I thoroughly understand that MaidSafe is a for-profit organization, and I fully understand that there are many people invested in MaidSafe who want to see it succeed. But it seems that they are just shooting themselves in the foot with the license. The success of MaidSafe will be with mass adoption and utility, not enforcement of open source beliefs. Don’t make people look for alternatives–make MaidSafe the go-to name for all things decenetralized; an alternative should not even be in their minds. I think OpenBazaar would have been a great integration with MaidSafe, and I’m a bit sad to see it not going to happen. I think it is a sign of more of the same to come.

I just want to conclude here that I’m not looking to attack anyone here, but just to share an opinion in the open source community. I appreciate everyone’s hard work here, and am very excited for this project. I hope as time goes on, people will be open minded about everything and won’t hold onto beliefs just for the sake of being right, but will be free to change and adapt as the needs of the community and “the world’s internet users” come up.

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