I like to think that I understand most open source licenses - but that is just making my head spin.
> The core of Ethereum will be released under the most liberal of licences.
Then why aren't they considering MIT? That's about as liberal as you can get.
> it will come with an amendment allowing it to be linked to be statically linked to software for which source code is not available.
NO NO NO NO STOP NO. Do not attempt to modify open source licenses without consulting with a lawyer. It seems innocent enough - but it could cause problems down the road. There is also some rules that say you cannot call it GPL anymore if you modify it [1].
Is it MIT or BSD? Thats what I mean ant by profiteering, it doesn't fit with the model of distributed, p2p, anonymous, decentralized and secure architecture it seems to be speaking about while at the same time promoting so business.
My reason is not that profiteering is bad, but in this particular case, I just don't see how you can compromise anonymity with copyright and a business around it.
For this to be truly anonymous, I just don't see how a business can be attached but cause at the end of the day we are still coupled to the original writers.
What's I'd love to see is something like ethereum but without a business or copyright attached to it.
I hope this makes sense, to truly build a decentralized and anonymous networ, can you try to also build a profitable business on top of it? Maybe I've misunderstood.
I'd love to start working with it, however, I realize how his is still have he early day. The future is a completely decentralized, anonymous p2p network that has no overwhelming force from a single agent to censor or corrupt information.
Imagine if facebook, Google, all of it could run on our phones, tsblets, desktop. You can't shut it down. By the n I assume we will have some sort of mesh networking where we don't even need to go through an isp, just a cluster of trusted and self healing network nodes.
The licences mentioned are MIT, MPL, LGPL, Affero, and GPL. All of those are very well-respected OSS licences. And it's easy to find examples of for-profit companies that use (and abide by) any one of those licences. I really don't see anything worth noting here.
Anonymity and decentralization make advertising-based revenue difficult, true, but there are lots of other open source business models; consulting for example.
However, in this case they're clear: they'll be selling etherium. That's completely compatible with even the most strict definition of Open Source (or Free Software, for that matter).
> And it's easy to find examples of for-profit companies that use (and abide by) any one of those licences.
You can also find companies that don't. I am under the impression that nprobe source code is under the GPL [1] but the author sends DMCA requests to those who want to use the source code under the terms of the GPL [2] [3]. Then there was the company who created the entourage edge (an Android powered device) - for the longest time they refused to release the modified kernel source....they eventually did then they went under.
https://ethereum.org/licensing