Quote from: SaltySpitoon on January 27, 2014, 06:31:24 AM

Bitcoin forum, people donated for a Bitcoin forum. Many of those people want Alt Coins gone entirely from Bitcointalk. The Altcoin section was made essentially as an off topic section, to group all non bitcoin crypto currencies in one place that is out of the way from the Bitcoin discussion. The spam is overwhelming the entire forum.

I'm afraid the admins at this forum are so protective of their Bitcoin SHA-256 wealth that they are oblivious to/ignoring the real-world implications of Bitcoin SHA-256's MIT/X11 Open Source License.

Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin SHA-256 under the MIT/X11 Open Source license for the specific purpose of allowing the creation of other versions of Bitcoin (aka Alt-coins). Yet, the know-it-all forum admins here constantly threaten to ban users and remove discussion of alt-coins not deemed the one official "Bitcoin."

Here's a newsflash: Bitcoin SHA-256 is not the official Bitcoin. There is no official Bitcoin after Satoshi stopped working on the client (0.3.19) AND the blockchain forked. Indeed, under the MIT/X11 Open Source License it is logically impossible for there to be ONE official Bitcoin after the original author's source-code was modified without the origin author and the blockchain forked after such modification. At that point, Bitcoin SHA-256 technically became an alt-coin called Bitcoin also operating under the MIT/X11 license. Bitcoin is a protocol. Bitcoin SHA256 is a crypto-currency. Re-read this if it doesn't make sense.

Stated differently, it's like creating a Linux forum when Linux came out, calling it a Linux forum, having people donate to the Linux forum, then limiting discussion to RedHat Linux because any other open-source distro is simply an Alt-OS and not the official Linux and is causing too much clutter. Pretty self-serving and contradictory to the spirit of Open source.

It's your site and you can do what you like, but it is a grave threat to the whole Open-source ecosystem when certain actors have the power to deem one version of an open-source source-code as official and deem others to be unofficial so as to undermine those alternate versions of the open-source source-code.

Again, this is your site, but instead of ignoring the spirit of the MIT/X11 Open Source license, you should change your name from "Bitcoin Forum" to "An Alt-coin named Bitcoin Forum."

However, considering that this forum derives it power from continuing the legal fiction that Bitcoin SHA-256 is the only official Bitcoin I doubt we'll see a name or policy change.

If you disagree that the forum operators are going against the spirit (if not the letter) of the MIT/X11 Open Source License, I look forward to your response.