BOSL or MIT - Orchard

My experience of working with large companies is the same as Pablo’s. I first discovered the problems with GPL and similar copyleft licenses nearly 20 years ago, when I was working at Deutsche Bank. In my experience, big companies have no problem supporting and contributing code back to open source projects but they’re highly skeptical and wary of viral licenses.

As a result, the popularity of copyleft (as opposed to permissive) licenses has been on the decline for many years…

…and the most popular open source licenses, by far, are Apache 2.0 and MIT, both of which are permissive.

Source: Open Source Licenses in 2022: Trends and Predictions

GPL isn’t a magic bullet alternative to BOSL. GPL would still present the same potential obstacle to companies like Gemini, Edge, and Unstoppable, of being required to open source and/or relicense their code.

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I’m not trying to make cheap shots. In my opinion, the majority of people who would actually be affected by this license have stated they’re against it, making two developers who have contributed in the past label it as a blocker, and that means BOSL will have a negative impact on the Zcash ecosystem, as Dodger said.

It’s also undeniably true that the ECC licensing as BOSL, against the wishes of the community, would be harmful for the ecosystem, and it’s undeniable that this hasn’t been a community decision yet a unilateral decision thus far. This simple lack of process is arguably enough to say this is harmful due to the precedent it sets.

And yes, you did have that quote which was accurate, yet you finished with “I also urge you to continue to listen to the community” which suggests the community is saying BOSL when you yourself say it’s split.

I’d argue this is a miscommunication at this point and would rather just move on. I don’t believe there is a weak argument, and meant to specifically respond to your closing statement that this status quo is the will of the community. I’m sorry for any of my own contributions to this misunderstanding.

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That quote was a just paralellism, a rethorical scheme, to this quote.

Be well.

@zooko, I have some more questions:

How do you plan to enforce the BOSL license, and how do you plan to fund your enforcement actions?

Do you plan to use the funds that ECC receives from Dev Fund through Bootstrap to pay attorneys to take action against members of the Zcash eco-system if you judge them to be in breach of BOSL?

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This is the sort of thread i mentioned Shawn. Has anyone captured any value here? I spent three hours reading all of this back and forth and can’t see an action item or a reconstitution of anything that wasn’t known prior to the thread. The community wanted BOSL back then, and wants it now. The only reason MIT keeps getting dredged up is because we’re grooming XMR concern trolls post by post!

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ECC requires a Contributor License Agreement to be signed for contributions to the orchard crate, which ensures it retains the ability to relicense if necessary. See here for the text (from the zcash/halo2 repo which had the file checked in, but the actual agreements are done via something like DocuSign).

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I think this hypothetical sounds like exactly the opposite of what Zooko has said he would do?

In Zooko’s post above he says the plan is to grant exceptions to developers building on Zcash, i.e. ‘members of the Zcash eco-system’.

I think a reasonable person could disagree with the BOSL license, but this seems like a straw man argument…

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What if he doesn’t “think they are potentially good long-term partners that [ECC] want to build a collaborative relationship with”?

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It’s quite obvious reading though this thread and through a few random forum polls that the community is pretty evenly split on the subject of the BOSL license and is still actively debating the pros and cons of it.

This is also disingenuous, several members of the Zcash community including the director and board members of the Zcash Foundation, Zcash founding scientists, and core developers from ECC whom have no association with XMR have expressed concerns about BOSL and it’s potential impact on the Zcash ecosystem.

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My interpretation of those two factors Zooko listed is that ECC would grant an exception

IF #1 “their intended use benefits the ZEC holders”

OR #2 “they are potentially good long-term partners” (edit OF → OR)

This is the most charitable interpretation and doesn’t involve ECC suing Zcash wallet devs so that is what I think he meant. Probably better to just ask Zooko if this is what he meant rather than assuming he is going to be suing wallet devs and using a rhetorical trick of asking him how ECC will pay for the lawsuits…

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Thanks Shawn. (Does this community not support DMs or am i suffering an id10t by not seeing them) Is there a running tally of prominent Zcash leadership and their “one liner” opinions about BOSL vs MIT? I feel like I’ve missed so much of past thread discussions that it will be impossible to dyor my way up to speed easily.

ECC:

ZFND:

QEDIT:

Other:

Other people who I don’t recognize and don’t know what description to use for, feel free to tell me:

Forum polls: MIT leaning
Twitter people posted by zooko: BOSL

Current tally of the individual accounts listed above:

  • 8 for BOSL (including three developers)
  • 20 for some form of change (including 10 developers)

I listed organizations by association, not to claim the people speaking were speaking on behalf on them. If I copied a dated opinion, or misread it, please let me know. I also believe every MIT advocate follows secparam in a secondary preference for dual licensing.

I also presume Chammy is BOSL, yet didn’t see any explicit statements saying that. A lot of people asked questions/gave some opinion, but didn’t state a preference, and wasn’t included accordingly. If I missed you, feel free to comment your preference to be added.

IF YOU FEEL I MISREPRESENTED IN YOU IN ANY WAY, TELL ME AND I’LL CORRECT IT. THE END.

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Ah! I looked for such a thing in the the Orchard repo and it wasn’t there…

I guess this would solve the direct problem, but it also creates yet more centralization: putting ECC in a position that’s privileged not just with respect to its own code, but also with respect to others’ contributed code. It’s explicitly ECC that’s named in the Contributor License Agreement…

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It also doesn’t handle the ECC being unable to adopt external code, the claimed benefit of copyleft, as it wouldn’t have the CLA applicable to external work and adopting said work would mean making their own work BOSL without exceptions granted, and when librustzcash/zcashd updated, they’d become BOSL as well (which could be a poison pill for adoptance).

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Thanks, and fwiw add me as MIT
I’m new to the forums, but irl represent as a 14 year senior sw subsystems tester (unit, functional, integration, interface, db)

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I’m not going to pretend to be a legal expert. I’m not going to pretend I know the implications of any license.

I know ZEC is flexible, and I know we’re all here because of ECC’s innovation. With that in mind, similarly to @aiyadt, I’m down to try BOSL now, and reassess in future.

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I find the idea appealing that we want many, many developers and companies contributing to or even just using Zcash tech. As a corporate engineer/architect who has sway in choosing what tech to work with at Big Corp, I always always always choose exclusively MIT-licensed dependencies, mainly so i never have to worry about it or waste time and money considering these types of licensing questions.

It seems that BOSL is basically intended to thwart Big Corp from using Orchard for proprietary code and perhaps also to thwart CoinB from improving by using Orchard for free? The idea is that Big Corp or CoinB might leave ZEC in the dust because people will use Big Corp or CoinB instead of Zcash?

To quote Darth Vader, “I find your lack of faith disturbing”.

In the worst case scenario, how much could Big Corp or CoinB using Orchard for free hurt ZEC? Do we really think that it could be an existential crisis?

I dont think that ZEC needs copyright protections to succeed. IMHO, Zcash needs improved tooling and developer facilities to create the biggest, baddest collection of MIT-licensed privacy :fire: that supports 100s and 1000s of developers working on, maintaining and integrating different facets of the ecosystem, building all kinds of amazing things that we havent thought of yet.

My focus would be scaling the developer community and cultivating new contributors. BOSL could be a risk to these goals.

Feel free to read my extremely unpopular thought experiment into how i would like to see the Zcash developer community scale :smile:

In short though, the benefit of holding/buying/mining ZEC is that we are going to build an unstoppable juggernaut, unencumbered by restrictive licensing and, by growing the developer ecosystem over years, possibly compete for lofty goals like ZEC being the most widely used and accepted private internet money.

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Updated the above list. By the current count:

  • Only three developers, zooko, aiyadt, and pitmutt, advocate for BOSL and BOSL alone
  • Every other developer is against BOSL, with an undisclosed preference, dual license preference, or MIT preference
  • Multiple developers are saying their companies wouldn’t bother working with this and multiple independent developers are saying they wouldn’t personally work with this

We have ECC developers, ZFND, a QEDIT (ZSAs) developer, the Zwallet developer, a Cake Wallet member, a Zephyr wallet developer (and potentially the only person actually interested in using Orchard outside of a direct fork because most other projects are interested in Halo 2 which is already MIT), and various other misc developers advocating for a change here.

We then have community members advocating for BOSL. By the post above, it’s 8 for BOSL (total, including the three developers) and 18 for some form of change.

While I won’t say it’s solely the developer community who should participate in this discussion, I do feel the community as a whole does not understand the development we will lose if we proceed with BOSL.

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Created free2z.cash, expert engineer at Big Corp, joined forum in 2016. I flopped back and forth. But, strong MIT lean. Final answer.

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Beyond the forum’s policy on these matters which recently came up (though I think when you effectively use the same nick it doesn’t make it unsubstantiated), I will note the reason I placed individual names with their votes, and evidence, was to ensure anyone could do their own evaluation. I’m personally inclined to ignore zooko, due to the blatant conflict of interest (which is debateable thanks to Bootstrap) and lack of development towards Zcash, but I understand he’s a major player in the community who others still value the opinion of on this matter, regardless of any potential CoI.

The most opinionated my post itself got was:

  • I don’t know some of y’all :stuck_out_tongue:
  • I tried to sort each section by how impactful I thought they were to the community (so while we have two ZCG members, aiyadt is first thanks to Nighthawk)

I will note that may have some mild controversy, as I placed sgp higher than some other people, such as fireice_uk and you, yet that was due to the project he works on, which is a ZCG grant recipient with a large user base integrating ZEC.

This isn’t me saying your post is invalid. I think it’s healthy to discuss potential CoIs and biases here. I’m also not a forum moderator :stuck_out_tongue: I just wanted to take the natural discussion of the people on the list as an opportunity to present my stance on it.