former value investor turned ethereum janitor 🧹

Allegedly the client is getting open sourced!

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

/ethereum foundation | opinions are my own but more than likely they come from Vitalik's blog paragraph.xyz/@chaskin

if they end up AGPL'ing i might quit farcaster altogether lol

Not an indication or endorsement of license choice for the client, but I’m curious why you object to AGPL?

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

3. In practice (if you want to take my word for it), AGPL does not result in the desired effect. It does not increase the number of people who relicense their stack to AGPL and it does not optimize for the body of OSS code in the wild, but it does increase the amount of duplicate effort of people rewriting subsets of the codebase. If we're lucky, the rewrite is permissive OSS (part of my career was doing this for money, clean room rewrites of restrictive code) but very often those rewrites stay internal/proprietary and the effort is fully duplicated.

4. The most credible position of AGPL/BSL is an "anti-competitive" stance (head start before other people in the ecosystem complete a partial rewrite, or cases where it needs to be "source-available" for audit purposes). This is fine in some contexts, but IMO would be quite antithetical to the messaging of Farcaster.

so many reasons (i have a ~1000 word post about this that i need to materialize), some highlights:

1. Strong copyleft assumes the codebase as a single unit, whereas in reality much of the utility of open source is reusing solutions to specific narrow sub-problems. Do you have 16 lines somewhere for efficiently converting bytes to hex that I could use? Too bad, gotta relicense my entire stack to AGPL to be able to do that. Most open source value permeates through the system in little snippets like this, wholesale forks are comparatively very rare.

2. Copyleft does not offer symmetric rights the way permissive licenses do. With a permissive license, everyone has the same rights, whereas with copyleft the IP holder/author has special rights (to relicense to a less/more restrictive license) that no one else has (certainly not the users). IMO permissive licenses are the most "decentralized" for properties we care about.

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