Hi folks! I’ve been reading the threads, trying to learn where other folks are coming from.
I’ve seen some questions about the history and motivation for the Bootstrap Open Source Licence in the first place. Here’s a quick recap of our motivation in choosing the BOSL in the first place, plus a recap of the Filecoin partnership deal. Then at the end I give my general plea for why sustainable economics is critical for our mission.
It can be confusing because there are two different things in play here: 1. The requirements of the BOSL itself for people to make derived works, and 2. Why ECC doesn’t automatically give a license exception to any project that asks. Those are two different things but they both arise from the same motivation — we believe that it is critical to make our work toward achieving our mission sustainable. I’ll touch on each of these two things below.
— why BOSL?
The motivation is the sustainability of free and open source software. Free and open source software as currently practiced suffers from the “tragedy of the commons” problem, which means — at least in economic theory — that it will be “under-produced”. That means the world will get less free and open source software, and less maintenance and improvement of that software, than people need.
One of my core beliefs is that we need less ideology and more pragmatism to succeed at our mission. That means learning from facts and not just from theories. So do the facts show that free and open source software does, in fact, get created and maintained too little to serve the world’s people? Yes. As Nadia Eghbal and Feross Aboukhadijeh have documented, free and open source software is currently produced far less than people need. It is indeed a tragedy, just as economic theory predicts.
Looking back on it, that just makes sense. If the people who are contributing, who are creating the value, receive no more reward from it than anyone else, then economic theory and common sense predicts that this be unsustainable and will produce poor results for everyone in society.
In fact, during the process of ECC releasing Halo2 and Orchard under BOSL, we got two new data points about this, when two of the most important projects in the entire crypto industry — Uniswap and MetaMask — both abandoned open source and went to proprietary software licenses instead. In both cases, it was because they considered it unsustainable to continue to give away all of their work for free, including to competitors who were taking money that they could have earned, without contributing anything back.
So this was our motivation in releasing Halo 2 (the world’s best zero-knowledge proof system) and Orchard (the world’s best shielded money protocol) under the BOSL — as an experiment in making free and open source software more sustainable.
— why not give a license exception to every project that asks? Or to everyone in the world?
Electric Coin Co holds the copyright to Halo 2 and Orchard, so we can grant licenses to specific users or for specific uses, or even grant additional permissions to the everyone to use these codebases under different terms. So why don’t we just grant licensing exceptions to every project that asks, or equivalently, why don’t we just grant the entire world permission to use Halo 2 and Orchard however they like, by releasing it under the MIT license?
The answer, again, has to do with sustainability of our mission. The ZEC holders are the ones who are contributing value to the world by supporting all of our work at ECC as well as the work of the Zcash Foundation, the Zcash Community Grants program, and through them to other groups downstream. And, the ZEC holders are the ones who are going to continue funding this value-creation for the world, at least through the end of the Dev Fund (2020–2024), or even — if they so choose — beyond.
This includes the discovery and the implementation of Halo 2 and Orchard. Without the support of the ZEC holders, it would not have been possible. It would have been another one of those might-have-beens that never happened. It would have been, in the jargon of economists, “under-produced”.
If we at ECC take the support of the ZEC holders, create value with it, and then give that value away for free to everyone else, then we would be short-circuiting the feedback loop that sustains our mission. (As per Tokidoki’s question.)
As an aside, I also wouldn’t feel right about that. It would seem unjust, to me. It would seem like a betrayal of the ZEC holders. However, even if you disagree with me on that moral/emotional dimension, perhaps you can still agree with me on the economic dimension, below.
If we contribute value to everyone else in the world, but we contribute value to the ZEC holders more, then that makes a positive economic feedback loop which is sustainable, which is scalable, and which is resistant to capture.
This is another of my core beliefs: we need to continue to do both at once — to produce more value for the world than we capture, and to reward contributors more than we reward non-contributors. Both are necessary for the sustainability and scalability of our mission. Ideological positions that prioritize only value creation and neglect economic feedback loops are doomed to failure. So are greedy strategies that prioritise value capture and neglect value creation.
So in my view the sustainability of our mission hinges on simultaneously both producing more value than we capture, and rewarding contributors more than non-contributors. And the core contributors of the Zcash mission are the ZEC holders, who make everything else possible.
— the Filecoin and Ethereum partnership
We now have a data point indicating that our approach of being selective about licensing of Halo 2 and Orchard can work! That data point is our partnership with the Filecoin and Ethereum organizations. (In answer to GGuy’s question.) That partnership has come in two steps (so far). In the first agreement, Filecoin orgs and the Ethereum Foundation agreed to pay $2m to ECC and collaborate on building Halo, and granted special exceptions to the BOSL for Filecoin and for Ethereum. In the second agreement, the Filecoin orgs agreed to give grants worth up to $7m and the ECC agreed to give grants up to $2m to teams who extend Zcash’s functionality, and ECC agreed to MIT-license Halo 2 (but not Orchard). That $9m can fund a lot of good work that adds functionality to ZEC, contributing value back to the ZEC holders — more than it does to the holders of all other tokens in the world.
It’s possible that by withholding a general-purpose license from everyone in the world to use Orchard for free under MIT, that ECC might be able to strike another deal with another partner, in which they contribute substantially back to the ZEC holders. Or maybe not! You can never tell. But if we were to license Orchard to everyone for free right now under MIT, then that would definitely cease to be a possibility.
Finally, I know that some people disagree with me about the above. Some folks, who are smart, honorable, well-informed people, believe that the “give everything away for free” strategy is already succeeding at freeing and empowering the world’s people, or maybe that it can start succeeding while still giving everything away for no cost to everyone. Some folks believe that it is a moral imperative to create free and open source software, and to give everything away to everyone for free, regardless of how successful that strategy is at providing global freedom.
I respect those people, and it’s fine with me if other people believe differently than I do, but if you want to understand why I make the choices that I make, start with the fact that I believe what I wrote above — my moral imperative is to nothing less than global freedom, and my current belief is that both producing and sharing excess value and nurturing economic positive feedback loops are necessary to achieve that mission.