Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Network protocol overview doc
by
lachesis
on 16/08/2010, 19:35:31 UTC
Mainly, I have not given permission because it is woefully incomplete, I have some plans for that doc, and it was not only illegal but disrespectful to copy it without asking first.  Still waiting for a simple acknowledgement that it was wrong, which would make me a lot more amenable to a creative commons license.
Some people have apologized:
I apologize, jgarzik, if it appeared I had attempted or otherwise accomplished that of taking credit for your work.  That wasn't my intention.  I will add reference to your initial post as credit in the wiki post, if it hasn't been done so already.
That said, I agree that you have the right to prevent people from copying your works exactly if you so choose. You really can't stop them from using it to produce a derivative work, though - after all, how would you know they didn't just read the code themselves?
Some people in the community (NewLibertyStandard, I'm looking at you) are continuing to insist that you have no right to copyright your works, which is clearly false. That said, I don't think mizery meant any harm in posting your information on the wiki. You didn't originally specify anything suggesting that you didn't want the document copied. When you did specify that you didn't want your document posted, it was taken down. It is common practice in this forum to copy important or interesting information to our wiki. Thus far, nobody has cared.

I vote his non-cooperative self-grandizing be rewarded by banning his contributions to svn and the forums.  This way he can start his own fork with a license requiring each user to pray to him before launching the client.
Let's not overreact: this is a single page of documentation we're talking about. I could reproduce it in a few hours, but I really don't want to if it is eventually going to get released under a permissive license. Let's not alienate one of our best community programmers over a single page of documentation.

Please guys, let's not make this a huge deal. Jgarzik, you could defuse this whole situation by releasing your document under a license that's friendly to copying and cooperation. NLS, please don't be a dick about all of this. Again guys, we're trying to build a community, not a conformity. If Jgarzik doesn't want to allow copying of his document, that's 100% his right. At least he has agreed to release all of his code, patches, etc etc with a MIT license, which is the really important part.

Jgarzik, NLS, etc: I have great respect for all of you and your contributions to Bitcoin. Please, let's not make this a us vs him thing.