Allow “special exception” to the Orchard codebase for the Monero Project

More then fair and I think this is a really good reason the community need to have this discussion. But as I stated I’m not sure making the Zcash source code “harder” for others to use actually benefits you achieving your financial result.

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No threats, accountability.
Nobody whatever his rank in the community should try to fuck with people’s investment. Otherwise, don’t call your project a cryptocurrency and don’t list on exchanges and don’t ask for a devfund.

In the real world, board members trying to ruin their investors go to jail, simple as that.

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Why not simply MIT licence it at that point? As a side note my personal opinion is that MIT is the way to go eventually, when ECC is ready. Granting special exception to Monero sends out a message that we are so stupid as to give gifts to people who openly shit on us.

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I agree. By the way, I’m keep calm anyway, since the ECC has always requested analysis and utility model modeling for Zcash before suggest various decisions to the community.

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Does anyone know how many of the top 50 cryptocurrencies (by marketcap) use a copyleft license?

Assuming we would allow Monero and all other private digital currency competitors (because that’s what they are, we are competing for adoption and market share) to use any future technological advancements funded by ZEC holders, buyers, miners without any restrictions.

What exactly is the benefit for me holding/buying/mining ZEC? Am I just invested into a funding mechanism for ZK research / a privacy science project?

I hope not because I want ZEC to succeed, not Monero or Pirate Chain. Making it as hard as possible to copy-paste or atleast “time-gate” new breakthroughs until ZEC had time to gain adoption and awareness should be the way to go.

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this is the elephant in the room, and it saddens it seems we don’t have community consensus on this simple question.

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I vote in favour.

Yes, Monero community has been trolling Zcash for years, and often with fake arguments and no constructive approach. But are we on the same level? I don’t think so, Zcash community has always shown to have an open mindset and we just don’t hate other privacy coins.
Now with Halo 2 coming and John Dobbertin revelation, Monero community have to deal with the fact that Zcash has a superior technology. XMR maxis must also give up the theory that ZEC is a spin-off of NSA.

In my opinion, If XMR adopt ZKSnarks and Halo 2 it would be beneficial to Zcash too. It would eventually help adoption, somewhat like what happened with all the EVM compatible chains; they brought more popularity to Ethereum and the ecosystem benefited from it.

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You are confused. Adoption is more people using Zcash.

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with just one small difference, Etherum was the leader in the Space - Zcash is far behind Monero in terms of adoption!

this could mean that nobody that is using XMR would ever touch Zcash, or why would they?

the only solution that would fit is to give the licence to anyone after a few years.
code is not even on mainnet and they already want it and we all know why!

@sgp and @sethforprivacy both of you trashtalked zcash in the past and now you have the nuts to ask for this?

as someone that has his lifesavings invested in zcash i strongly recommend to not give it to the monero folks. we the zoddlers are the ones that are financing this project, please listen to the community or go and see the twitter profiles from all those guys. their intention is not good, all they want is to destroy zcash and now since there is nothing left to bash on they just copy the project and we get left behind!

they are playing with us! open your eyes!

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I am of two minds on this issue, but ultimately I would vote not to grant the exemption.

I appreciate the views of @daira and other devs, and genuinely admire their altruism and commitment to the principles of openness and to the broad social benefit of privacy technology. I also have no particular animus towards the Monero community and don’t see punishing them or getting back at them as a particularly helpful objective. I think they advance the adoption of privacy technology in their own way, and that’s great.

Ultimately though, I believe that granting access to Zcash’s most cutting edge advancement to indifferent or competitive entities ought to be predicated on a clear addition of value to Zcash holders, or to the Zcash ecosystem. While many of us see the spread of private currency and store of value as the end goal here, there is a reason we have specifically chosen “Team Zcash”. I for one hope to see rising incentives for the adoption of Zcash specifically, because I think Zcash has the best team and the best community spirit of any cryptocurrency out there, and the greater extent that we can obtain maximal network effects and resources for Zcash, the better. That is to say that every additional user or dollar of market cap that goes to a different network, would, in my view, have been better allocated to Zcash BOTH to reward investors/stakeholders AND advance the goal of privacy for all.

So if someone can come up with a compelling argument for why granting this exemption for Monero would be specifically beneficial for the Zcash community, Zcash Tech, and Zcash adoption, I’ll be very open to hearing it/considering it. So far I have only heard appeals to abstract ideals, which are great, but I think would ultimately be counterproductive to our shared long-term goals and divert attention and resources from the superior team and superior tech.

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So zcash community pay tax to fund indirectly the development of all privacy-focused coin and not just ZEC!! really…

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The GPL does not work because Zcash’s main repo is MIT. So, you still would need a “special exemption” of sorts for the main Zcash and Zebra repos.

See example license annoyances with the GPL in the past for Zcash: Update license information for files under build-aux/m4 · Issue #2827 · zcash/zcash · GitHub

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Yeah, no offence @sgp but I don’t think he was talking about Monero in that paragraph. Not everything revolves around your needs.

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You should really consider editing his post to include something similar to what I did on Reddit:

As you can see, he is already using the faux proposal to attack Zcash. This was never an honest attempt at discussion.

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A property of free speech is that you must grant it equally to those you dislike to say things you abhor as to those you like and agree with.

Surely there is an analogous principle for FOSS.

If there is not an exception made here, animosity and retaliation should not be the reason. That feels antithetical to FOSS values to me.

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I was still at ECC when the decision to license Halo 2 under BOSL was made. Like Daira, I was (and remain) opposed to it.

As I’ve said in the past, I don’t think the use of a non-standard license provides significant benefit to Zcash or its community, but I do see very clearly how it can result in FUD and friction, and could discourage people and teams from contributing to the Zcash ecosystem.

I guess I’m implicitly opposed to granting a special exception to Monero because I believe that Orchard should be MIT/Apache licensed, in which case Monero wouldn’t need an exception in the first place. :man_shrugging:

Zcash is built on a foundation of code written by others who licensed it freely, openly and permissively. I think we should do the same. It just doesn’t feel right to me, that we should jealously hoard our innovations or seek to maximise the benefit that Zcash derives from them, at the cost of putting obstacles in the way of others’ ability to benefit from those innovations.

Where would we be if Satoshi had taken that approach?

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Totally agreed there. MIT or GPL? Sure, this is the way to go, especially after the code is released to mainnet (before you might run a risk that someone will yoink it and implement before Zcash mainnet)

Special exemption for Monero? Right now they only thing they are special in is coming up with brigades to raid Reddit and Twitter threads about Zcash, it isn’t a coincidence that the only two Monero people in this thread are leaders of those brigades.

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I think there are 3 options a reasonable principled person could choose:

  1. Keep BOSL and no exceptions given

  2. Keep BOSL, exceptions given based on some clearly defined principles

  3. Switch to a more permissive license such as MIT

I’m open minded and could be persuaded to support any one of these three. But if we go with option #2, then we have to decide on the criteria, not make a one time exception for Monero.

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“No” to special exceptions. Enthusiastic “:raised_hands: YES :raised_hands:” to relicensing.

I support foss; freedom to run, freedom to study the source, freedom to share, freedom to modify and distribute. This is what makes the open source community great. So many things are benefiting from the open source licenses that exist: MIT, Apache 2, and GPL. All my work currently has been built on the contributions of the global coding community and oss.

Bosl was intended to defend from underfunding and takeover. These seem like they are not the intent of this ask. It is incredibly unlikely that Monero community would use orchid to take over zcash market.

My second dislike of BOSL is that it is a non-standard license which makes use for enterprise client a long conversation around licensing and legal vs privacy and technology.

Switching from BOSL to something more permissive is a great move! Not for the sake of Monero. For the sake of the world.

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