Whats funny is that Ripple inst (fully) open source. They are like twitter, claiming to be open source because a tiny part of their script is online.
Your right, Ripple is affraid their brand is not recognized enough to allow publish full open source, and they are right
Sure are. I was just going to suggest that since Ripple is open source, we should create a Ripple with BTC (or NMC) as the native currency, and thus resolve the issue that the initial creators controlled 100% of the XRP.
Still, if the underlying idea isn't patented, isn't this something we could do?
It's of course something you could do, however with native BTC underneath, you'd have quite long confirmation times (0 conf transactions likely will not cut it...).
Check out their Open Source release statement, the nearly only thing that they request is that you don't call your fork Ripple or use their logos, to avoid confusion - the code itself is MIT licensed, just like bitcoin-qt.
Their code is at github, have fun hacking away!
Also now that its "open source" are you able to mine it?
Being Open Source has nothing to do with mining, but if you want to use your computer to crunch numbers and get XRP, you can do that.
Go to
www.ComputingForGood.org and get started. One big difference is that when you trade computation for XRP, you aren't just generating heat like with Bitcoin mining. Instead, you are crunching results for scientific research (mostly AIDS and research).
I know that open source has nothing to do wit mining, I just forgot a ".". Do they have a GUI or is it just a pool sort of thing?
Computingforgood piggybacks on the World Community Grid, a bunch of projects that use BOINC to do distributed computing and verification of the results generated. BOINC itself does have GUIs for various operating systems and can also run from the command line.
At this point I don't know enough about Ripple to comment, except to say that so far it seems to be much harder to get started with Ripple than it was to get started with Bitcoin.
Well, you can use the JavaScript client on Ripple.com, I consider that to be easier to get started than downloading a couple GB of blockchain data. If you want to run your own full node, you might have to do some more heavy lifting of course - if you are not able to compile it according to the instructions given though, you likely also are not really going to be able to administer the server it'll run on.