It works together with my policy changes. I also just pushed a fix so it works by itself. Gavin may wish to reconsider it, based on this new use, but regardless of whether it gets merged or not is irrelevant. Bitcoin isn't a monopolistic centralized proprietary software, it's a community of mostly free software, and miners too are free to run whatever code they wish.
I don't understand what you mean by "policy changes." Can you elaborate on that?
I just had a look at github, and I didn't see any pull requests along these lines. Do you have a link?
See my 'policy' branch at
http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/w/bitcoind/luke-jr.git ; fixed 'myFreeTx' is also there.
Note that these are my personal branches, not necessarily intended or designed for any mainstream use, possibly not even working (eg, IPv6).
You're right, Bitcoin's not proprietary, and you are free to run whatever code you want. But the problem is, the patch that Gavin submitted violates the established protocol. When you generate a transaction that, according to the established protocol would require a transaction fee, but you do not include that fee in your transaction, no other node will accept that transaction. That's why Gavin withdrew the patch. And as I said in the comments for the patch, the patch isn't necessary anyway. If you happen to generate the transaction, you get the transaction fee back and it's free (for you). If someone else generates it, they get the fee.
Policies are not protocol. There are miners who accept less (or even none, in some cases) fees. You just have to connect your client to the
Free transaction relay network to get across the anti-social clients that refuse to relay anything they wouldn't personally accept.
The problem with "simply" collecting your own fee is that someone else can collect it too. Sometimes, you might prefer to WAIT for your own block, rather than MAYBE get the fee if you by unlikely chance generate the next one...
No, it just allows the address-controller to decide which other miner is allowed to get the fee.
Are we talking about the same patch? I'm referring to the "My free tx" patch submitted by Gavin, and described here:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/97. That patch does not give you any control over who gets the fee.
This was in response to the earlier suggestion for a similar patch, but one which treated a known address (not in the miner's wallet) as "fee", trusting the holder of that address to distribute earnings fairly.