In part yes, but perhaps a larger motivation is just not wanting the system closed off altogether. If a large company with billions in marketing and government influence could clone and lock everyone out who is looking for something different then this becomes an issue. So not so much “its our code leave it alone” (it’s already gpl so is not our code) , but its our network (our == community/people of the world etc.) and we really want freedom.
Recently (2 board meetings ago) I was in fact very much in favour of bsd/mit etc. licencing, but am currently persuaded (and I am one in many so hopefully I have no weight in these conversations, I try to not anyway, regardless of normal human nature etc.) that GPL is a way to say, hey this is open source and you need to be, no more closed silos and giving our privacy away. I know that is perhaps extreme, but I believe the current mechanism is very extreme where large companies are not playing the game with any rules or honest that we can recognise.
Nick has been speaking with Monitas again and looking at a potential half way house license. We will never please everyone, granted, but I think we still have the opportunity to try and see how far we can take pure freedom though banning obfuscation and political influences. So I would say I am not set, but as of yet unconvinced that any other licence is promoting real freedom more than GPL at the moment, I do want to be corrected though for sure. I really listed hard to the debate and find it fascinating, but as I said since speaking with Bruce Perens in 1994/5 (slashdot) I have not seen the perfect license to this date. Seems like extremes (GPL or Proprietary closed) and an abundance of attempts in the middle to do the right thing
At least I think there are few closed minds on the subject so that is good, but it is a very hard decision to get wrong.
what is left is just the desire to not let other profit off of our work,
I don’t believe this is the reason for MaidSafe choosing GPL. What you haven’t mentioned here is the whole point of GPL, which is to move evermore towards a “free as in freedom” model of software sharing.
Saying “you can only use our code if you want to be part of this future” is a necessary and powerful incentive for people to adopt and support “free as in freedom” licensing.
It’s not just about letting the code be as widely used as possible in order to benefit humanity, but about encouraging more and more people to create and improve code that is “free as in freedom”, instead of forking off the commons and keeping your enhancements to yourself for profit. This is the parasitic business model that is crushing us in so many arenas: socialise costs and privatise profit.
No wonder OpenBazaar envisage some of their partners won’t go for GPL. Those businesses are the problem, so let’s think twice about helping them so as not to be mean to them, or having to leave them out of this party. One way or another, they are going to be working against what I believe SAFE stands for.
I’m knew to the “free as in freedom” model, but more and more persuaded by it, and if GPL is to succeed, I think any exceptions need to be carefully weighed against this.
I assume they would fork the code and create their own proxy Network, maybe rename it to something else. But the SAFE Network still remains open, right? They would run the parallel Network (closed) and market it to the masses for faster adoption. And if they really had government influence, then enforcing the GPL license seems moot in certain countries.
I’m trying to understand the extent of what can happen to our own SAFE Network. I know we have no control over the forks.
Since day one I was a little bit aware/wary of say Microsoft adopting this or Apple, embedding it into their OS and offering services beyond any competitors hope. If they can grab enough market share (or force it on people) by sheer weight of existing presence, then they have a huge advantage at monopoly. Then selling the benefits (huge free hard drive, zero data loss etc.) at the cost of privacy (leave out self authentication) or backdoor the system under duress of government agencies etc.to actually do the opposite of free people.
In terms of forks then great we want people to try more/better ways and figure it al out, there is a huge road ahead and the more that travel it the better, but only in the open.
It is like Mrk Andreeson said the other day, this is how the Internet should have been, not closed and monitored like now
The underlying network in SAFE is likely super efficient and beyond any centralised system (see netflix have released an open version of their content deliver, guess what its dynamo influenced (which is great when you her people saying how video cannot work well in these networks)). Imagine amazon netflix google azure being able to run fully decentralised on a hostile network (the other side of the firewalls they are on) and at the same speed/scalability (encryption slows us down, full centralisation speeds us up again).
This can give larger companies an edge they could use to beat off the ‘open versions’ (note not SAFE but any open system, look at linux/bsd etc.). If we can ‘force’ or aid the push towards openness then it may be worth considering. At least in the public network, enterprise networks are different, granted, but the public network I think is worth challenge or two. Although again, not closed minded about it all either.
I think they (large companies) will do it anyway, GPL or not. We may have recourse IF the courts are not influenced. I won’t hold my breath… They will also create their own customized Network for private use.
Yes, it is worth considering, and I understand why MaidSafe has chosen GPL. Our success depends on community awareness and the move away from closed-source. Because of Edward Snowden’s revelations, I think we have an advantage. But I don’t know if it is enough to break people away from their dependencies.
If software is closed source then the end users are at the mercy of the developer. The developer can be as unscrupulous as they like, can include back doors, advertising, make the software as unsavory as he wants, and the end user is forced to use it so long as the benefits of using it outweigh the cons, even if the benefit/con ratio is 51:49 %. Also as @dirvine pointed out the developer can be preasured, and in turn influence the entire established user base. Opening the source code creates competition and prevents such dynamics from occurring. It prevents the developer from putting political preasure on the end user and also protects the developer from being politically preasured themselves because they are not the sole source of the software. I very much doubt the gov’t could get away with preasuring Apple, Microsoft or Google to put back doors in their systems or release data if they had made their software truly open source because the competition would have been too fierce. If either Apple, Microsoft or Google had their software would have simply been picked up by another developer who would have removed the back doors and carried on and the gov’t would have spent all that money for nothing. Why is it illegal to change the firmware on phones? Uh maybe because they don’t want you making them free and buggering with their backdoors. Hmmm that seems like a possibility.
The thing about this argument is, few projects have the power to make companies change their business model because of their license, rather than just being ignored because of it.
Linux managed it, but it wasn’t because it made the world depend on itself (that happened after) - companies like Red Hat simply found another business model that works very well for them, which is selling support rather than closed-source technology.
As for where I stand, I’m skeptical that MaidSafe has the power to change the world.
That’s one possibility of many. Telecoms and hardware manufacturers don’t like it when people waste their support’s time by contacting them about problems that are actually in third-party firmware. Opening your source code gives competitors the opportunity to use it. It also makes DRM (such as network locks and media copy protection) completely useless.
Not that I morally agree with any of these reasons, but government backdoor conspiracies are far from the only one.
The thing is not that some big company will come along and make their own version and close off their revisions. That’s sucky, sure. But what we can’t afford is them making changes and using their innovations to shut off use of the technology or advancement of it.
Maybe they do something cool and don’t release their code. Okay. They can’t then license those changes in a way to keep somebody from copying or duplicating, if the overall tech is licensed correctly in the first place.
Indeed. But is preventing that more important than letting some company do that and join the network, with all the new users (and attention) that brings?
I’m probably in over my head here but, as far as I can see, since the network will be autonomous and in the wild, it will be pretty hard, if not impossible, to keep anybody from joining the network, whether they’re in license violation or not.
Again, I think it’s not so much about restricting use by anyone (even if they are not being nice and sharing what we think they should and what the license requires) as it is about shutting the door on the likelihood of use and innovation being restricted by some centralized interest such as a large corporation or government. In other words, the patents are pretty much completely defensive.
I have always found it ironic when freedom advocates tyrannically outlaw tyranny…
Part of being free is being free to trade freedoms for other benefits…
For example in the Bitcoin world, It is good that we don’t need to trust a central authority – But that doesn’t mean somebody is an idiot to leave their coins with Circle or Coinbase… There are some benefits to doing so, particularly if you are an idiot.
As such, I think open source software ought to be encouraged, but it ought not be the law…
The debate here is about the use of different licenses. The only reason Maidsafe has them and patents is to stave off tyranny against the openness of the network, not to enforce it on others.
I agree 100%, but I also imagine a world where people were private, but governments, corporations and software driven systems were open, a dream perhaps, but a goal for sure. Now if we take on the challenge (and it is a challenge), what exists that is powerful enough to persuade us we are wrong?
Here is the thing about IP, whether patent or copyright, is that they cover virtually ALL downstream works. The trouble with this is that technical development, in practice takes certain paths, particularly in terms of optimization.
Lets think about this, you have SAFE which is Open source and three contributors write three pieces of code, utilities or something. Lets call these these three lines A, B and C.
Now the way that a GPL based project works lets say someone working on A creates “x” which is an improvement on A. x is a genuine improvement and no one can find a better way to do what x does. So everyone changes over to Ax.
Then someone on the B line figures out that x, which some modifications could be used to do something useful on the B line. So they modify x making x2. Pretty soon everyone on the B line uses Bx2. Then some bright fellow realizes that the increases in efficiency in Bx2 allow his idea y to be workable and viable when it wasn’t before. So now you have B(x2)y. Then someone coverts these things to the C line creating C(x3)(y2) and again someone adds (z).
And this process goes on and on, with contributors making incremental improvements, which because of the decentralized power of a community of contributors winds up being faster and more efficient in improving services than traditional closed source models.
The problem is that there are only so many viable lines in any real world solution, and so eventually, if you allow close source companies to enter the code, without subjecting them to some kind of license, they can choke out (or worse control and censor) downstream development.
If X is closed source, then (x2) and (x3) are illegal, y is never practical, and z never happens. The lines get choked off.
This video discusses a lot of underlying open-source theory, including the fact that IP tends to reduce innovation, as we know historically from the steam engines.
EDIT: the steam engine example is made at about 9:55
You should probably have said “trade rights for other benefits”.
Freedoms are inalienable and therefore even if they’re traded, such contracts are invalid as they violate basic human rights.
I am talking about the freedom to use proprietary software, specifically… I am free to use Gimp, but just because I can doesn’t mean Photoshop ought to be outlawed. I am free to hold my own Bitcoin wallet – But I oughta be free to sacrifice that right if I trust the professionals at Circle or Coinbase to secure my wallet more than myself. Some people would rather have the police protect them than to own their own firearm. Sometimes they are right, and they would hurt themselves.
There is a tendency to say that because we have freedoms they ought to always be exercised… I don’t approve of ridiculing people who choose to exercise their freedom to trust somebody more capable than themselves. In the Bitcoin space that seems to be a common thing.
