I don’t think there is anything to worry about regards to others forking it. As long as the safe network has the maid team behind it who cares. These devs know the networks nuts and bolts more than any other. Sure, I can see it been used for enterprise/intranet scenarios for ultimate security. But in the wide open world, safe is number 1 really.
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Yup. That’t the biggest point I forgot about in my reply above.
Defensive patent.
edit: I would not mind a branded pack of cards.
I hear that, if you shuffling a deck of cards once per second since the beginning of the universe, you stand more change of getting the same combination of cards than hacking and decrypting data on the SAFEnetwork in the same amount of time… 
https://www.math.hmc.edu/funfacts/ffiles/10002.4-6.shtml
Other branding services available, first on google search.
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So happy reading this, the group excitement at nearing the goal and being close to huge simplifications must be extremely satisfying. It’s a little contagious too. Amazing work, hats off, glasses raised, more power to you!
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Actually Sanju is right.
There are plenty of case studies about first movers not being the dominant ones, and in business school they teach you why there is also a second mover advantage.
It is akin to drafting in car races, the first car is doing all the hard work using more fuel to fight against the air pressure, while the cars behind are just tailgating saving fuel.
The same happens with business or any other project, any competitor out there such as MEGA, they can simply sit around eating nachos saving R&D time and money, and once they see it half solved, they jump back in to snatch it and implementing it to their needs.
The pioneer has to spend 10 years of R&D while a competitor can save all that time, taking their research spending a few monts of retooling it to their needs, and stealing their thunder by beating the pioneer to market.
Btw the vast majority of today’s dominant players in the markets weren’t the pioneers.
- Altavista invented the search engine, now it is defunct. Google is the 4th generation of search engines and the only one surviving from that era.
- CompuServe was the first ISP, now defunct.
- Mosaic/Netscape was the first “killer app” browser, now defunct. Chrome is currently the dominant one and it would be the 6th gen and last player in the web browsing market.
- Netmarket was the first “online shopping”, and Amazon was literally the second mover advantage.
- The first social network (Six Degrees) and the second most popular social network (MySpace) died without glory, until learned Facebook learned from their mistakes to make it work.
None of the pioneering internet companies from the dot com bubble survived, with the exception of eBay, Amazon and Priceline.
In the car industry, the inventor was a German Karl Benz, and yet it was an American who knew how to scale it owning the market, Henry Ford.
And it was the Italians who made it look cool, the Japanese and Korean are the latest in the game and they own the market globally. And now the Chinese are slowly creeping in the game…
So yeah, as you can see, just by looking the most recent history, the first mover advantage has been an exception to the rule.
The latecomers can learn without cost from the mistakes of the pioneers.
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Wasn’t saying saying he was either right or wrong. Just extremely incorrect calling someone else’s ideas stupid.
You can make arguments to support either POV and argue them all day. Some will agree, some won’t, remain static or move on, life I guess 
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Yep.
After connection is established, help menu is available:
> /help
> Possible commands:
/help - prints this help menu
/exit - terminates chat app
/send $file_path - attempts to send given file to connected peer. File path might be relative or absolute
It’s nothing special, but if you type /send /tmp/my_file.txt, file request will be sent to connected peer which will be able either to reject or accept the file 
See demo:
It’s a tmux session with one window on my local machine and other with the server. The view is a little bit distorted by
ttyrec , but that should be visible anyway
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Can’t it be a good ide to protect the code for a limited time, when the project is about to move into a critical phase, make it opensource again when it’s released? Is it relevant if there is 10% or 50% possibility of someone trying make a bad move and copy the project, if the cost of protecting the project by time limited closed source, is low? Will there be significant damage to other projects if all code isn’t open source for a limited time of let’s say a year?
i believe the Patents can be good as a last resort but it can go both ways and to protect against situations so you never have to defend with patatents I believe is the best. Patents can cost 10-20 million dollars to defend and take many years or even decades to settle.
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Partly agree, if not completely. This is the function of the alpha test nets I think. Test nets are pushing early adoption on to users.
There is an odd balance here.
- How do you persuade people to adopt a secure network, if you keep the source code closed? I think if available services and apps are good, people, just as the current internet, wont care.
- How do you manage the risk of code being hijacked early on, to be turned in to another network, or for bad applications to be created to harvest data? Is the browser SAFE?
It is critical. Maybe do a closed source run on the first beta heavily explaining why opensource code is being withheld for a period of adoption.
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I’m not worried about another team trying to run with this code. It’s still bleeding edge and everyone is distracted by Blockchain, and to our advantage. Besides, projects like Tezos just saw this. They haven’t quite yet launched and on their forum a project called Tezos Libre popped up, no one is interested haha. The majority of the money is invested in the people who know what they are doing and the ones that set out to finish it, the ones making the promises, the ones that have skin in the game. Everyone knows those factors and ignores the other to a quite high degree. I’m not a Bitcoin maximalist but look at Bitcoin Cash or as most refer to it Bcash! It’s only doing as good as it is because it could airdrop.
If a copycat project cloned the code and rebranded etc they would still be playing catch up trying to understand something that David, Viv, and the rest of the team, could ponder in their sleep. Not worried 
That is true unless you have the financial backing+industry connections of Kim Dotcom or someone like that.
If Tezos Libre announced that it was being acquired or even something vague such as adopted by Kim Dotcom, it could turn the tables very quickly.
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This is the only potential threat I see - if someone with huge clout ripped it off once it’s proven, e.g. Facebook decides to swap business model to their version of the Safe network with a pre-mine, or a web hosting company tries to capture the market (both very unlikely I think).
Generally people with huge clout haven’t developed it by ripping others off, and they have a lot to lose by being seen as copy-cats. They would also quickly need to develop a great understanding of the network.
There’s also the diversity that’s likely to exist at an early stage on Safe due to developers already working on projects, and coming up to launch they’ll all get a bunch of funds available to further development if they’re holding some MAID.
Stuff that’s already running on Alpha & beta networks will quickly / immediately be available on the V1 Safe network, and I don’t think an alternative is likely to catch up on that quickly.
So I guess it’s a theoretical threat, but I doubt a copycat team even with great resources would be able to compete with the Safe network before a significant network effect could be established. I’m sure MaidSafe will also massively step up marketing around launch, and anyone trying to steal the limelight would very obviously not be the real deal.
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I see your point but all Kim has done in the Blockchain era so far is shill, so if he can’t deviler a fork of a Blockchain then I’m still not worried. He should have been able to pull off mega upload 2.0 by now and I haven’t seen it.
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This is interesting. What is the real reason why the US went after him?
Google drive, Gmail attachments are full of infringing content… I guarantee people email music, ebooks, videos to each other not understanding what they are doing.
SAFEnetwork is MEGA MEGA UPLOAD. Not a single sniff from the US government.
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That is the key.
It wouldn’t be a copy cat if it is gpl and without patents, so it would be fair game.
They can argue they are just collaborating with the ecosystem. At the end it would be their branding with our technology, but without getting any credits or benefits from the decade long research.
Plenty of capitalists with clout dedicated their lives in ripping off true innovators coughGatescough
(And before anyone jumps on Jobs as well, I’ll remind you that he exchanged Xerox Parc research for Apple’s shares, so it was a fair deal)
If you have enough capital, you can hire talented coders in that domain. It doesn’t matter if Kim had or not experience with blockchain per se, what matters is to know the industry and have the right connections to accelerate.
And he not releasing anything is what worries me, I always suspected he was just lurking in the dark to launch a SafeNetwork copycat (MegaNet) as soon as the network was cooked enough.
He is well aware of MaidSafe.
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Probably just to make an example of him, at least just my guess. That is the typical modus operandi of law enforcement and Kim is a sort of figure Head with a site explicitly encouraging pirating content.
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Trying to think of some questions and try different perspective. If it would be time limited closed source would there be significant risk that key devlopers who maybe can make significant contribution would miss out because they couldn’t see all code? I think it’s good that we have this discussion even if nothing is changed, that we don’t leave no stone unturned. Even if David, Nick and the team probably have been thinking about these questions for a decade or so. Keep up the amazing work, I wish David, Nick and all the team the very best in the coming weeks of development. You guys deserve all the best and soon the pieces will fall into place.
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To add on another example, Motorola & Nokia were one of the early movers. Then came Apple with seamless product and great marketing. Now they’re the most valuable company in the world.
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Would it be of interest if we had a poll about if the community and the team would like the code to be open or closed source for a critical phase until launch? Would that be a ok idea? I just throw this thought out there, just think it is an interesting idea.
First came DARPA net, then legacy internet, freenet, TOR, Blockchain, then SAFE Network! Muahaha
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