Satoshi,
So you support people taking your code, modifying it to skim bitcoins off the miner, and then releasing the binary without releasing the modified source code?
So you support people taking your code, modifying it to skim bitcoins off the miner, and then releasing the binary without releasing the modified source code?
That's exactly the point! I get the impression that many people commenting do not understand the issues involved quiet well enough and get confused a little ... no offense
So I would like to hear a response to that question too ... are you going to support and condone someone taking the code, adding a little eye-candy and little nice features perhaps and distributing this proprietary closed-sourced client to the bitcoin community? As you seem to be actually encouraging that by releasing the code under MIT license.
How are you going to check if there isn't any "bonus" to that eye-candy in the form of a backdoor, if it does follow the protocol correctly, if it doesn't at some point in time just transfer all the bitcoins from everyone to some hardcoded address? Is there any reliable way or are we just supposed to *trust* the publisher?
Then those users get what they deserve for using a closed source version, while a reliable open source/MIT version would still be available. If the closed source version is eating their bitcoins they will abandon it soon. There is even the possibility that some person develops a closed source version from scratch and does the same, no MIT/GPL/other license of the current bitcoin client is going to change anything on that.