BOSL or MIT - Orchard

[daira]

@amiller

I think it’s inappropriate to use the threat of state enforcement as the means to achieve the desired ends of incentive alignment. Like the license works because it carries the threat of creating a lawsuit against developers who don’t follow the license. Lawsuits work in part based on power asymmetry, a well-prepared and well funded entity like ECC would have too much of an edge against independent developers. I personally view there being a 0% chance of ECC attacking an independent dev team because of their values, but I can’t prove that to anyone else and I don’t see anything in the way of safeguards against it. This is equally true for GPL or any copy-left too.

Thankyou for cogently and concisely making the anarchist case against copyleft!

Anyway, we won the argument, eventually: librustzcash now depends on a version of orchard licensed as MIT OR Apache-2.0, so last night I merged the PR to remove the notices about BOSL mentioned in my previous post above: Remove notices about the BOSL license by daira · Pull Request #1071 · zcash/librustzcash · GitHub .

Once librustzcash is released, this unblocks ZF to do a release of Zebra that doesn’t depend on the BOSL license exception, and similarly for the next release of zcashd.