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

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.

...

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

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