Dear community, Vod and amishmanish, thank you for taking the time to engage. Also amishmanish thank you for your excellent representation in your previous post. Here I will respond to your license and organization questions, then discuss Asterisk vs digital slavery under the oligarch vs self-interest, and finally that your help makes all the difference.


This post is scoped to philanthropists in this pre-release phase. If Asterisk is Bitcoin, then the year now is 2007. This letter and thread discusses mostly vision and values, and a wide range of topics are discussed currently only in private correspondence and personal meetings.

For other readers, please hold during this funding round and another 16 months. Hugely useful decentralized protocols, tools and apps speak louder than words. Our team's thousands and thousands of man hours of effort should currently be very much primarily focused on the release goal.


*Open source license*
For open source license, this will become an actionable question many months into the future however the original or extended AGPL with linking exception (a la LibBitcoin) or Apache (similar to Bitcoin Core's choice of the MIT license) should be fine.

The objective is that the Asterisk parts that you want to embed in your programs, should be perfectly embeddable in a way that is compatible with your purposes, whether you're making free or commercial software. (In comparison, Linux' GNU GPL v3 would be anathema in this role as tools licensed under it cannot be used in non-free programs and apps.)

Remember that beyond open source license choice are equally or even more impactful factors, which relate to ethics. For example, Oracle after acquiring MySQL, pulled the unit tests from open view. This meant that on paper, MySQL was open source because the code was GPLv2, but you couldn't do anything with it due to Oracle's greed.


*Organization*
Organizational matters are discussed on page 4+ in "g) Organizational Structure" and "f) Financial prospects". The appendix is still recent and up to date and as you see we _will_ incorporate a foundation.


*Asterisk vs your digital slavery as hostage to the oligarch vs self-interest*
Under both your questions seems to lie a question about how Asterisk relates to self-interest.

Asterisk's object is to offer an alternative path to the current daily hostage situation you yourself experience online, where your activity is claimed and owned by a middleman.

The middleman is some app service run by a corporation which in turn is owned by shareholders. The shareholders are giving you access to their service that they own, as a favour that they don't charge you for, and they do this exclusively to push the most severe agenda of _their_ interest over _your_ interest. Just like feudalism, where they're the oligarch and you're the peasant or slave.


Of course many of us normal people are vigorously uneasy by this and many simply stay away from a lot of these services because it feels ethically unsettling and also there are real unknowns about their conduct that can mean risk with respect to money and otherwise.

One issue is moral corruption as in the risk that a rapacious oligarch who should not be trusted with anything would be in charge of the service. Here Zuckerberg offers a quintessential example, as he calls Facebook users "dumb fucks", laughs about that he is over the law and decrees that you "have no right to privacy".

Another issue is immoral and or undignifying conduct such as a realization that all your and your family's personal information including vacation photos, medical records, lawyer correspondence, your contact lists and social graph, comprehensive behavioral information as well as your business information most likely has ended up with foreign corporations and governments for value extraction, resale, storage and processing forever.


With respect to self-interest, Asterisk sticks out from the typical maximized-self-interest-by-value-extraction-through-shareholding-in-a-corporation model.

Firstly Asterisk is a decentralized protocol, which in any situation it is not possible for anyone to value-extract much on. For comparison, how much money can the ISO/ANSI organization charge you tops for a copy of the C++ programming language standard.

Second the object of Asterisk is to continue to be a cure for a long time, and it would not be harmonious with this ethical objective to in some form engage shareholders who then could and likely enough would pressure for compromising the ethics later through the control and ownership that belongs to their title as shareholder. There is some space for nonobliged funding model discussion however better keep it simple.


In essence Asterisk is about important aspects of keeping and advancing Earth as a place where you actually want to live.

Thank you again for bringing up these questions. I look forward to discussing this further with you, please raise any thoughts or questions you have.


*Responsibility, karma*
This is written in a way to wake people up but not so much for entertainment.

This thread has bestowed you with real responsibility over your and others' future. The normal principle is that you get what you wish for, independent of whether the vision you buy into is Zuckerberg-Orwell style slavery where you will need authorization to speak, eat, work or date and where your human rights vanish, or a vision of a dignified, respectful civil order.

The usual principle is, with all good causes weighed together: do what you can for a good cause. Sometimes you can talk, sometimes you can help, sometimes you can excercise choice, and sometimes you can fund.

This may sound grave and it is, however also like all things Asterisk should be fun and easy.


Please note again that Asterisk is pre-release. Wikipedia or Red Cross grade crowdfunding campaigning is another day. Aside from competence which we have, additional funding is instrumental in moving forward, which we need as we're not breatharians.

Time is running fast and Asterisk would better be available to the public now or better yet, yesterday.

If you can donate 0.1, 1, 10 or 100 Bitcoins then please by all means do so:


*If you are a philanthropist who loves freedom, we're looking forward to make a decisive difference together with you.*

If you know a philanthropist, send him or her this thread and the letter.

Looking forward to get in touch.



A host of disclaimers apply to this text: this text is not advice of any sort including financial and no responsibility is taken for this text. Only to be quoted in part or whole with the written permission of the author.