Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Switch to GPL
by
Macho
on 13/09/2010, 05:45:20 UTC
That's one obvious consequence of MIT licensing, and has been going on for decades.  I doubt it is a surprise to satoshi, or anyone else.

yeah, it's not surprising at all ... that's why MIT should not be considered in a first place, exactly because it allows this kind of abuse. The question is not whether it is surprising but whether it is desirable, wouldn't you say? If any kind of proprietary software stemming from this would get popular, it's not going to be surprising at all when a hell of a lot of people will get robbed of all their bitcoins ... that doesn't mean we should allow it, does it? I said people are just confused ... talking about whether it is "surprising" the the license allows for obvious abuse rather than talking about eliminating that abuse. Do you support that kind of "obvious consequence" then? It seem to me that you're arguing in its favor.

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Either MIT or GPL, both licenses are fine.  MIT has been working great for *BSD and X11; there's no reason why MIT would be problematic for bitcoin.  GPLv3 adds some helpful patent language, that's about it.  Bitcoin's patent problems are in the area of linked libraries (openssl's EC-DSA), not with bitcoin itself, so that does not seem like a large concern here.

X11 or BSD are not small client programs that handle your freaking financial transactions, I bet you would be all happy to accept this program I made, it makes credit card transactions a lot easier, you just type in your credit card information into it ... it's real convenient, shall I send it to you? I'm sure you wouldn't have any problem with that, would ya?

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Speaking only for myself, as a programmer who has created or worked on dozens of GPL'd projects, including some of the largest in the world (kernel, gcc).

It's hard to believe that such an intelligent person would make such comments you just did then ... I'm startled.