1.First of all, again, the only restriction is literally taking the code and using it as-is to launch a for-profit company the next day. Furthermore, it will be time-limited, so something like 2 years from each release. Literally the same as Uniswap v3 did. And to answer the question of why, sure.
I really don't care what Uniswap is doing, especially when knowing who is behind them, how they are getting funded, and how they are doing their business.
Hardware wallet manufacturer should never be compared with uniswap exchange.
I don't find anything wrong with that.
It is wrong when you are claiming to have open source code sometimes in future, but in reality this will never happen.
Be honest to yourself, to everyone else, and don't ever mention words ''open source'' in connection with RingWallet.
Edit: I read some more as well and it seems you are correct, adding a restriction for commercial use cases makes the code not respect open-source rules anymore. I was genuinely not aware of this beforehand. I will give this some more thought and see if we want to go the source available vs fully open source route. My fear is exactly the one described above; i.e. someone forking it the next day and launching a competitor.
No problem, you can release it with any code you want, just learn what FOSS and open source really is.
Just imagine if Satoshi was scared that someone will copy and fork his project called Bitcoin...
List of Hardware wallets with Open Source firmware who are NOT scared of someone forking their code:
Thanks for the answer. I'll answer in parts.
Re Uniswap; I used it as an example so you could understand what I meant. I also don't know who they're supported by and whatnot to be honest.
Re Open source:
1. I genuinely didn't know the difference between open-source and source-available at the time. That's my mistake and I apologise for it.
2. As mentioned in my previous message, you, as well as some other people we are talking to privately have expressed opinions in regards to why go open source vs source-available so we haven't made a final decision as of right now. At the very minimum, the code will be made source-available and we are still debating whether it will be under a trully open source license or a commons clause one. I will update here after we make a final decision.
Re Satoshi & Bitcoin; I don't have such delusions of grandeur. I think ringwallet is a cool nifty product but it will never be even 0.1% of bitcoin, so not sure it's a fair comparison. With that said, I do understand where you're coming from, and just to be clear, the difference between the license we initially planed to use and a commons license is that ours was/is time-limited; meaning anyone would've been able to use the code for whatever commercial purposes they wanted to after a period of 2 years, as opposed to commons clause, which as far as I understand, is permanent.
So back to your theoretical example, if Satoshi published bitcoin under a 2-year limited license, people would've just forked bitcoin 2 years later, so not really the end of the world to be honest. Because again, we didn't want to gatekeep the code
forever but rather just have a 2-year headstart. Anyway. I am genuinely considering just publishing it completely as open-source when the time of launch comes, but the launch is still a few months away and until then we are still wrapping up what is left and will be making a final decision in regards to this as well.
Lastly, regarding your list; that's an awesome list and thanks for sharing. I actually went through the list myself, and since you seem to care a lot about open-source, which I appreciate, I just want to make some mentions to you regarding the list. Just to be clear, not trying to be a dickhead, but I genuinely went through the repos, so I figured some of the things I will list below should be of interest to you.
https://github.com/proto-at-block/bitkey -> commons clause license. It's combined with MIT, but it's the same as it being source-available because it also has commons clause license.
https://github.com/Cypherock -> commons clause license. Again, combined with MIT but same as above, it's source-avaialble in reality not open-source.
https://github.com/hito-xyz -> they say open source but as you can see the github is completely empty bar from some documentation; the software you're supposed to download is completely closed-source, not even source-available. Also, apparently they've been in pre-sale mode for about 2 years now and as far as I've been able to see, not much if anything has been shipped out. There's even a thread (and apparently a telegram group) of people complaining about it. Here's the thread:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/hito-new-hardware-wallet-open-source-5487572https://github.com/bithd -> literal complete copy-paste fork of trezor, not sure if it's worth including in such a list, because a lot of the people on that list have actually done real heavy work and should be praised for it. This is just ctrl+c / ctrl+v.
https://github.com/digitalbitbox -> completely empty github so not even source-available
https://github.com/bitlox -> most of it is forked from bitpay, hive and multibit. The repos which are not forked have no discernible license of any kind and have not been updated in 7-8 years at a minimum, so again, not sure it qualifies as open-source or that it deserves to be on that list.
I think that's a really cool list and just wanted to let you know about these because I figured you just didn't have the time to actually check and that's why you haven't removed them yet. Some of those guys on that list have really done an incredible amount of work and I figured they shouldn't be bundled with things like the above. Anyway, thanks for the feedback and the information, I'll give this some proper thought and we will in either case announce our decision here once it's made.