Topic: Switch to GPL (Read 17380 times)

Want to join the Fun!

BIND is ISC
Compiz is MIT
Enlightenment is BSD
Fluxbox is MIT
GHC and Hugs BSD
Haiku is MIT
lighttpd is BSD
LLVM and clang are BSD
Lua is MIT
ncurses is BSD
nginx is BSD
OpenSSH is BSD
PuTTY is MIT
Tcl is BSD
thttpd is BSD
Tor is BSD
vi is BSD
Webkit is BSD
X11 and most related projects are MIT
Most implementations of Smalltalk are BSD or MIT
Most implementations of JavaScript, as well as jquery and YUI are BSD or MIT
Bittorrent became successful, because they were MIT, libtorrent (base for a big number of clients) is BSD

I can do this too:

Bicycles = Freedom
Cars = Communism

Freestyle = Freedom
Backstroke = Communism

Brunettes = Freedom
Blondes = Communism

If anything, GPL slows adoption compared to less restrictive licenses, such as MIT, BSD, or no license/copyright (Public Domain).  People naturally try to make the best (in their own eyes) use of their resources, generally trying to increase their wealth (subjective).  A business that wants to release their own client loses much of their competitive edge if they have to release the source code (and therefore their improvements) to their competitors.  So why would they put the resources into something that won't give them a competitive edge when they have other, more profitable things they can do with their resources?  However, an MIT license allows them to make changes and not release the source to their competitors, which may actually give them an edge over their competition, potentially leading to higher profits.  If you don't have businesses promoting Bitcoin with their software releases, Bitcoin-related services, marketing budgets, etc., what chance does Bitcoin have to become mainstream?  What use is Bitcoin to the mainstream if mainstream businesses don't use it?  Most real life transactions are either consumers to business, or business to business.  Why make Bitcoin less likely to become mainstream by using the GPL license?

My Bitcoin implementation will certainly not be GPL, and will be released in the Public Domain (assuming I don't unwittingly run into problems with any potential future co-developers demanding a license, asserting fallacious claims of control over the real property of myself and others), as I don't believe in initiating (or threatening the initiation of) violence to increase wealth (everything every human does is in attempt to increase their personal wealth in their own eyes), which means I don't believe in government or copyright, as the foundation of government is based on the (threat of) initiation of violence, and all of your open-source licenses are based on copyright laws that require the government.  Until someone accomplishes the impossible and provides a proof that people should initiate violence to get what they want, any beliefs in support of government, copyright, and licenses based on copyright are unfounded, and are nothing more than religion and an attempt to force their religion onto others.

Nothing of the sort, since one can legally implement an abusive client from scratch.

Ďakujem!

Promised BTC sent

By releasing under a copyleft licence, you don't prevent abuses, but you make sure that they're illegal.

SMF bug. The "number of characters left" display on the signature input box appears to be wrong. Someone else had pointed out to me that my address there was invalid, and thought I corrected it by adding a "3" to the end:

1F417eczAAbh41V4oLGNf3DqXLY72hsM73

Should be working now, since I shorted the text in other places.

GPL-advocates believe that simply by releasing with this license you'd prevent proprietary-software-scams??
Seriously? Do you really think that somebody willing to steal people's money will even bother to know what's the software license?

Only to the same extent of copyright.

Not so with copyleft. The whole idea, or at least a big part of it, is to exploit overly extensive copyright protections in order to give those who infringe on the rights of end users a taste of their own medicine.

...Unless I misunderstood you.

Licensing and copyright are orthogonal.
+1 for the rest

I don't know where you got the idea that enforcing people to release source code they wrote is more freedom. It has nothing to do with copyrights, I might have nothing against copying my source code once it's public, but it doesn't mean I must make it public in the first place. It doesn't restrict any freedoms.

MIT/BSD = Freedom
GPL = Communism

Scams are also possible with GPL, not many people can read or understand source code. And it's possible to write closed source client from scratch and besides, there are easier ways to cheat than writing your own client.

I happen to like the GPL. It's a big, beautiful fuck-you to the entire copyright system. That said, I see nothing wrong with the MIT license for the "official" Bitcoin client. Anyone who wants a GPL Bitcoin client badly enough can just take the source code for 0.3.19, make some changes, give his version a different name, and release it under the GPL. No more butthurt.

I'm not sending funds to an address with a wrong checksum

It's not about "freedom", but property rights. Any enforcement of copyright allows you to control my use of my real property. In your example, Alice would be infringing on Bob's ownership of his own body, which would not be OK.

Interesting -- the checksum for that address is wrong. Maybe a bug in Bitcoin? The actual address seems to be:
1F417eczAAbh41V4oLGNf3DqXLYBmgs6s

Free software licences force publishers to give freedom to their customers. It is not about freedom for the publisher, it is about freedom for the users. Of course, a user can become a publisher, but the licence is about the user's rights. There is, therefore, no paradox.

I don't know if you have problems with restricting the freedom of restricting freedom. Has Alice the freedom to put Bob in prison, or should we restrict Alice's freedom in order to protect Bob's ?

1 BTC donation sent XD

EDIT :

david@bankbox:~$ bitcoin validateaddress 1F417eczAAbh41V4oLGNf3DqXLY72hsM7
{
    "isvalid" : false
}

Enforcing freedom is rather like fucking for virginity.

The MIT license is basically a grant of use for any purpose, plus a disclaimer of liability and the (coercively enforceable) requirement to include the original author's copyright notice and the license itself on derived works. That is, if you as a software developer take MIT-licensed software and distribute a derived version or copy of it without adhering to the license terms, the legal system permits the author to bring a lawsuit. That, in turn, means things like courts, judges, police, fines, imprisonment for "contempt" and the well-oiled .45 that lies underneath every pile of government paperwork.

Doesn't sound like freedom to me, if you as a software developer can be subjected to all that, just because the original author objects to how you've twiddled some bits.

And the Gnu licenses are worse, since they add more restrictions.

All in all, the MIT license is fine. But if you want more of that freedom stuff, you ought to be arguing the opposite: put the Bitcoin code fully into the public domain, like the world's very first web server, CERN httpd was. Or like the stuff listed here: http://unlicense.org/

Deciding whether to run untrusted code is your responsibility, the mere fact a project is open source doesn't mean someone can compile and distribute a rogue binary to people who won't bother to compile themselves.

Is your online banking interface under AGPL ?
No. Doesn't mean it can deal with money, you use it because you trust it to work as advertised.

Nothing wrong with having a different opinion, however there's no technical reason why the source should be under GPL rather than MIT.
It doesn't really make a difference. What matters is the protocol, not the mainstream client.