13 ms·

Ethereum is super interesting but I'm kinda turned off by seeing "Licensing" and looks like it's aimed at some sort of profiteering, which I don't think is comp

Ethereum is super interesting but I'm kinda turned off by seeing "Licensing" and looks like it's aimed at some sort of profiteering, which I don't think is compatible with the sort of architecture we are going for, but I might be wrong here, please feel free to correct me.

natrius 11y ago
The licensing page lists three buckets of free, open source licenses for various parts of the project. I don't understand. https://ethereum.org/licensing https://ethereum.org/licensing
- nadams 11y ago
  I like to think that I understand most open source licenses - but that is just making my head spin. > The core of Ethereum will be released under the most liberal of licences. Then why aren't they considering MIT? That's about as liberal as you can get. > it will come with an amendment allowing it to be linked to be statically linked to software for which source code is not available. NO NO NO NO STOP NO. Do not attempt to modify open source licenses without consulting with a lawyer. It seems innocent enough - but it could cause problems down the road. There is also some rules that say you cannot call it GPL anymore if you modify it [1]. [1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL
  - badsock 11y ago
    Wait, the sentence above the second one that you quote is: "In this way, while we have not arrived at a final licence, we expect to select one of the MIT licence, the MPL licence or the LGPL licence." They are definitely considering the MIT licence. Did they do a ninja edit? I definitely agree with you about the amendment thing.
    - nadams 11y ago
      > They are definitely considering the MIT licence. Did they do a ninja edit? Perhaps my head was spinning from the vagueness of their license decision and I just overlooked it.
- curiousjorge 11y ago
  Is it MIT or BSD? Thats what I mean ant by profiteering, it doesn't fit with the model of distributed, p2p, anonymous, decentralized and secure architecture it seems to be speaking about while at the same time promoting so business. My reason is not that profiteering is bad, but in this particular case, I just don't see how you can compromise anonymity with copyright and a business around it. For this to be truly anonymous, I just don't see how a business can be attached but cause at the end of the day we are still coupled to the original writers. What's I'd love to see is something like ethereum but without a business or copyright attached to it. I hope this makes sense, to truly build a decentralized and anonymous networ, can you try to also build a profitable business on top of it? Maybe I've misunderstood. I'd love to start working with it, however, I realize how his is still have he early day. The future is a completely decentralized, anonymous p2p network that has no overwhelming force from a single agent to censor or corrupt information. Imagine if facebook, Google, all of it could run on our phones, tsblets, desktop. You can't shut it down. By the n I assume we will have some sort of mesh networking where we don't even need to go through an isp, just a cluster of trusted and self healing network nodes.
  - badsock 11y ago
    The licences mentioned are MIT, MPL, LGPL, Affero, and GPL. All of those are very well-respected OSS licences. And it's easy to find examples of for-profit companies that use (and abide by) any one of those licences. I really don't see anything worth noting here. Anonymity and decentralization make advertising-based revenue difficult, true, but there are lots of other open source business models; consulting for example. However, in this case they're clear: they'll be selling etherium. That's completely compatible with even the most strict definition of Open Source (or Free Software, for that matter).
    - nadams 11y ago
      > And it's easy to find examples of for-profit companies that use (and abide by) any one of those licences. You can also find companies that don't. I am under the impression that nprobe source code is under the GPL [1] but the author sends DMCA requests to those who want to use the source code under the terms of the GPL [2] [3]. Then there was the company who created the entourage edge (an Android powered device) - for the longest time they refused to release the modified kernel source....they eventually did then they went under. [1] http://linux.exosec.net/mirrors/www.ntop.org/nProbe.html http://linux.exosec.net/mirrors/www.ntop.org/nProbe.html [2] https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/859890b8aaf4db678dce9624db252bbcab06707f https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/859890b8aaf4db678dce96... [3] https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/85c03a289fe56c67636ed6409011bc76964272a4 https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/85c03a289fe56c67636ed6...
dogma1138 11y ago
Nothing wrong with licensing, cryptocurrencies on the other well meh... All of those "proof of work" type schemes eventually will dwindle down to the same centralized network they are aiming to replace. With the amount of compute power required to perform any operation mining will end up being handled by a couple of big players which the rest will use a proxy. BitCoin already is pretty much centralized with mining becoming an operation which requires you to setup a bloody data center to get into the game, yes allot of those are some weird complexes in the middle of no-where China, but they are still bloody huge and expensive. And there isn't much you can do about it, if you build a network which establishes "trust" based on "effort" the effort cannot be trivial, or to be more exact the amount of trust one will have in such network is tied directly to the amount of effort one has to put into it to perform a given task.
- fleitz 11y ago
  Yup, it's like pretending VISA and MASTERCARD are decentralized forms of currency. At least you can buy a beer with them in under 10 minutes.
  - HappyTypist 11y ago
    You can indeed buy anything less than ~$100 instantly with Bitcoin. Payment processors like BitPay and Coinbase accept zero confirmation transactions for small amounts, simply because the costs of double-spending 0 confirm are massive.
    - fleitz 11y ago
      I thought bitcoin was a decentralized currency that didn't use payment processors like VISA / MasterCard...
      - icebraining 11y ago
        Bitcoin doesn't require payment processors, but it doesn't prevent people from using them either.

natrius 11y ago

The licensing page lists three buckets of free, open source licenses for various parts of the project. I don't understand. https://ethereum.org/licensing https://ethereum.org/licensing

nadams 11y ago
I like to think that I understand most open source licenses - but that is just making my head spin. > The core of Ethereum will be released under the most liberal of licences. Then why aren't they considering MIT? That's about as liberal as you can get. > it will come with an amendment allowing it to be linked to be statically linked to software for which source code is not available. NO NO NO NO STOP NO. Do not attempt to modify open source licenses without consulting with a lawyer. It seems innocent enough - but it could cause problems down the road. There is also some rules that say you cannot call it GPL anymore if you modify it [1]. [1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#ModifyGPL
- badsock 11y ago
  Wait, the sentence above the second one that you quote is: "In this way, while we have not arrived at a final licence, we expect to select one of the MIT licence, the MPL licence or the LGPL licence." They are definitely considering the MIT licence. Did they do a ninja edit? I definitely agree with you about the amendment thing.
  - nadams 11y ago
    > They are definitely considering the MIT licence. Did they do a ninja edit? Perhaps my head was spinning from the vagueness of their license decision and I just overlooked it.
curiousjorge 11y ago
Is it MIT or BSD? Thats what I mean ant by profiteering, it doesn't fit with the model of distributed, p2p, anonymous, decentralized and secure architecture it seems to be speaking about while at the same time promoting so business. My reason is not that profiteering is bad, but in this particular case, I just don't see how you can compromise anonymity with copyright and a business around it. For this to be truly anonymous, I just don't see how a business can be attached but cause at the end of the day we are still coupled to the original writers. What's I'd love to see is something like ethereum but without a business or copyright attached to it. I hope this makes sense, to truly build a decentralized and anonymous networ, can you try to also build a profitable business on top of it? Maybe I've misunderstood. I'd love to start working with it, however, I realize how his is still have he early day. The future is a completely decentralized, anonymous p2p network that has no overwhelming force from a single agent to censor or corrupt information. Imagine if facebook, Google, all of it could run on our phones, tsblets, desktop. You can't shut it down. By the n I assume we will have some sort of mesh networking where we don't even need to go through an isp, just a cluster of trusted and self healing network nodes.
- badsock 11y ago
  The licences mentioned are MIT, MPL, LGPL, Affero, and GPL. All of those are very well-respected OSS licences. And it's easy to find examples of for-profit companies that use (and abide by) any one of those licences. I really don't see anything worth noting here. Anonymity and decentralization make advertising-based revenue difficult, true, but there are lots of other open source business models; consulting for example. However, in this case they're clear: they'll be selling etherium. That's completely compatible with even the most strict definition of Open Source (or Free Software, for that matter).
  - nadams 11y ago
    > And it's easy to find examples of for-profit companies that use (and abide by) any one of those licences. You can also find companies that don't. I am under the impression that nprobe source code is under the GPL [1] but the author sends DMCA requests to those who want to use the source code under the terms of the GPL [2] [3]. Then there was the company who created the entourage edge (an Android powered device) - for the longest time they refused to release the modified kernel source....they eventually did then they went under. [1] http://linux.exosec.net/mirrors/www.ntop.org/nProbe.html http://linux.exosec.net/mirrors/www.ntop.org/nProbe.html [2] https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/859890b8aaf4db678dce9624db252bbcab06707f https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/859890b8aaf4db678dce96... [3] https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/85c03a289fe56c67636ed6409011bc76964272a4 https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/85c03a289fe56c67636ed6...

dogma1138 11y ago

Nothing wrong with licensing, cryptocurrencies on the other well meh... All of those "proof of work" type schemes eventually will dwindle down to the same centralized network they are aiming to replace. With the amount of compute power required to perform any operation mining will end up being handled by a couple of big players which the rest will use a proxy. BitCoin already is pretty much centralized with mining becoming an operation which requires you to setup a bloody data center to get into the game, yes allot of those are some weird complexes in the middle of no-where China, but they are still bloody huge and expensive. And there isn't much you can do about it, if you build a network which establishes "trust" based on "effort" the effort cannot be trivial, or to be more exact the amount of trust one will have in such network is tied directly to the amount of effort one has to put into it to perform a given task.

fleitz 11y ago
Yup, it's like pretending VISA and MASTERCARD are decentralized forms of currency. At least you can buy a beer with them in under 10 minutes.
- HappyTypist 11y ago
  You can indeed buy anything less than ~$100 instantly with Bitcoin. Payment processors like BitPay and Coinbase accept zero confirmation transactions for small amounts, simply because the costs of double-spending 0 confirm are massive.
  - fleitz 11y ago
    I thought bitcoin was a decentralized currency that didn't use payment processors like VISA / MasterCard...
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Bitcoin doesn't require payment processors, but it doesn't prevent people from using them either.