Doesn’t any developer who downloads Zcash and make any edit immediately subject their local copy and edits to BOSL? If for some reason it’s legally argued Apache 2.0 code, as currently in the codebase, cannot be successfully used with BOSL, every single developer who touches Zcash would be open to liability.
Also, as a developer who has a local copy and edits, whose work is no longer covered by the exception, if I ever publish my work, say, in a PR to Zcash… I first have to upload it to a repo establishing it’s BOSL at some point in the future no later than 12 months from the day of publication? I guess the PR itself is kinda submitting it to a repo? Except the work and license grant needs to be published “prior” and this is simultaneously?
And for the license, with each PR I make, I just need to attach “an irrevocable offer to license said copies to the public free of charge under this License,”? Isn’t it considered such offers must be an explicit statement by the party, as you can’t implicitly consider GPL-derivatives GPL? It’s how GPL violations occur in the first place? While I don’t assume the ECC would ever prosecute people behind these PRs, will the Zcash repo PR template be edited to automatically include this statement to ease the development process and ensure there’s no potential outstanding liability? If a submitter does not include it initially, yet corrects their PR to include one, will the ECC publish a statement renouncing any claim of liability despite the contributor having already broken the BOSL license in a publicly verifiable way (albeit, one without damages if corrected soon after, making it a waste of time for everyone if the ECC wanted to action on it)?
This is the plethora of legal questions which now threaten development, even to Zcash itself, making people and organizations unwilling to work with it, and not only will I no longer be interested in contributing to the Zcash ecosystem if BOSL hits mainnet, but I feel like it might even be legally inadvisable for any developer to contribute to any Zcash daemon at that point.
Zooko did say “So, I’m going to ask our lawyers how to craft a blanket exception which gives all users the necessary legal permissions to create their own Future Friendly Fork of the Zcash blockchain,”, which will likely mimic BSV’s own license, and that would void such issues for ZEC itself (but what about the regtest environment which is a brand new chain? what if it’s desirable to restart testnet?) along with friendly forks, yet this blanket exception isn’t in front of us and Zcashd had the BOSL license applied 5 days ago, making it already in this legal nightmare.
Beyond my existing question about what the community process Zooko claims exists (by saying we, the community, can change it) is, I would also like to ask does the ECC have any actionable plans to sell this technology for the benefit of Zcash, or does it know of any party planning to use Orchard, who wouldn’t be willing to simply BOSL their work (which we can’t even merge back because we’re not BOSL), the ECC considers notable enough to warrant this “experiment” applied to the entire protocol?
EDIT: This entire time I thought librustzcash was MIT by exception and that’d be enough for wallets and integrators. You cannot create Orchard shielded transactions through librustzcash AFAICT. You have to directly use the BOSL licensed orchard crate. That means every single wallet, exchange integration, L2… using Orchard will either be reliant on an ECC corporate exception or need to move to BOSL (which may not be possible for existing projects) even if they’re fine with the crates as-is used on the Zcash network. This will directly force most of the shielded ecosystem into this licensing hell which is not just limited to Zcashd itself and people forking it for their own protocols. That was my misunderstanding and this just makes it all the more problematic.