BOSL or MIT - Orchard

[kayabaNerve]

I think this set of questions absolutely needs to be answered, and I’m frustrated they have yet to (in general, not in the 8h since posting). While zooko did finally release the opinion of the ECC on this matter, which I appreciate as there’s been a lack of communication there, I will say I feel it skips over the fact that the community may be unable to continue the Zcash blockchain without organizational support. This concern would be alleviated by question 6 of theirs.

Regarding question 3/4, I was actually planning to integrate ZEC into my own upcoming work, yet I am unfortunately here to say I will be unable to depending on how this plays out, as it’d no longer meet the definition of free software as a whole (see last paragraph). I will also note that while librustzcash from the ECC is exceptioned, I actually have my own fork of librustzcash which uses different package versions to resolve conflicts in my work. I would be unable to do this in the future without my entire work being BOSL, which is absolutely not what I’m planning (I’m planning the project as a whole to be MIT/GPL with MIT components). I do not believe this is any way sustainable nor do I want to keep a project involving several different currencies locked to old versions because I have one dependency I can’t tweak the versions of, without breaking copyright law, nor can I remove due to users. It’s really just something I’m unwilling to risk/work around/build a dedicated set of microservices for.

Specifically replying to zooko’s response:

I do believe you said this stance could be changed with the community’s decision on Twitter, and would need that in order to be changed as it was funded by the ZEC community. Would you be willing to officially present the decision in a Helios poll for members of ZCAP to vote on (as the forum polls here do show there is interest, yet as stated above, are not necessarily accurate)?

ECC has directly said they’re looking to profiting from Orchard licensing. Considering this is ZEC funded development, will that funding be in any way given directly back to the ZEC community (not just ECC has money so ECC can do more things which possibly benefits ZEC)?

Halo 2 as on GitHub never had its license updated and still solely has BOSL published, preventing the developers I know from being willing to work with it (as that’s the much more definitive source than a blog post). I find it dishonest to claim its MIT licensed when the PR to do so has been stalled. Could you please ensure it’s finally merged? This happened 10 hours ago.

And then finally, in response the mention of ZIP 1014, The Open Source Definition | Open Source Initiative section 8 means Zcash, if using this exception, will no longer be FOSS. While it may be possible to convert it back to FOSS using a BOSL sublicense, it will not be as presented (yet if anyone can just rename the license and be done with it… maybe? it’s all such a mess). This is inexcusable IMO.

[gottabeJay]

@kayabaNerve

Would you be willing to officially present the decision in a Helios poll for members of ZCAP to vote on (as the forum polls here do show there is interest, yet as stated above, are not necessarily accurate)?

I am very much against using ZCAP as a mechanism to resolve this issue (or any issue) and/or to gauge sentiment of the community. Its unrepresentative. its a tiny sample size. The process of getting into Zcap is gatekept and has allowed for people who are not active in the Zcash community (some hostile) to get in. Also many of ECC and ZF executives and staff are on ZCAP and there is a clear CoI (even tho in this instance most of them want MIT). The poll on top is very representative of the emphasis: active community here on the forums. I actually appreciate @zooko taking Zcashers on twitter into account.

I do have one observation to make. From what I can see, ‘most’ devs want Orchard to be MIT. While most non dev Zcashers want it to stay BOSL. I fear Zcashers want it to stay BOSL because they dont understand the implications for outside devs working on Zcash Orchard will have. I understand that Zcashers dont want to give away Zcash tech, after all we paid for it. But we should ask ourselves why we dont mind that all other code including HALO (which is a rather big deal) is MIT… but dont want Orchard to be MIT…

[kayabaNerve]

I’d posit the ECC and ZF members who are active on ZCAP are expected to vote their opinion, and any pressure by ECC/ZF to the contrary would be hostile. Besides, it is private voting, so I don’t believe any conflict of interest caused by the orgs could arise. It’s also the precise fact that most of the ECC/ZF members seem to be personally advocating for a move away from BOSL to some degree that’s why I want a formal poll to be done. If the members wanted to use their personal vote for BOSL to benefit their group in some form (CoI caused by the individuals)… they wouldn’t be here on the forums advocating against BOSL.

As for sample size, that is a fair criticism, except the forum was criticized for not being manipulable when the explicit purpose of ZCAP is to manage these decisions by a verifiable community vote. If Zooko, head of the ECC, says it’s up to the community to decide, and then the community has a forum poll in favor of MIT, and then that’s not usable because it’s not verifiable, and then ZCAP is proposed, and that’s not usable because… what is usable? The status quo? Does the comment become this won’t change? I feel we need to either hear there isn’t a community process (despite previous comments) or have the community process formalized (which I’d presume to be ZCAP).

I had another paragraph, yet I moved this to the previous thread where it may be better focused.

[fireice_uk]

@gottabeJay

I do have one observation to make. From what I can see, ‘most’ devs want Orchard to be MIT. While most non dev Zcashers want it to stay BOSL. I fear Zcashers want it to stay BOSL because they dont understand the implications for outside devs working on Zcash Orchard will have.

I think this is an excellent point.

[z.yodler]

@zooko

We now have a data point indicating that our approach of being selective about licensing of Halo 2 and Orchard can work!

Can we put some things in perspective here?

The amount of funds committed by these two partnerships is nearly insulting imho; the optics of the partnership is good, but the amount of money is more an indication of failed negotiations imho.

The bottom line with BOSL is it puts ECC (ie Zooko at the moment) in control of who can build on the software. At the very least, it raise questions and uncertainty about what OUTSIDE developers feel they can build with the crates and dependencies… that stifles innovation from outside ECC. Great example 1 is what @secparam mentioned he’d advise startup projects to do above (just avoid non MIT licenses). And good example 2 is there are rumblings in the community about just avoiding building on Zcash (and choosing a different coin). So, this seems like another way of ostracizing outside developers (see threads on Zwallet/WarpWallet if you need a reference).

I disagree with the BOSL license and the implication for the future development of Zcash. Satoshi made a revolutionary discovery; and Zcash built on that. DigiByte developed a key real-time diff adjustment feature; and Zcash adopted it. ECC now discovers halo2… and now we need to throttle other’s development because of “the mission”. Come on now

[joris]

@z.yodler

So, this seems like another way of ostracizing outside developers

Ostracizing rhett, scamcoin forker of zclassic and bitcoinprivate ?
Ostracising monero trolls and their toxicity towards Zcash community ?

So far, the BOSL licence is working as intended and protect Zec holders. Thank you @zooko

Do you have anymore examples or are you done with your bad faith, and your out of touch of reality and ridiculous semantics ?

[fireice_uk]

Ostracizing rhett, scamcoin forker of zclassic and bitcoinprivate ?

Agreed.

Ostracising monero trolls and their toxicity towards Zcash community ?

Totally agreed, standing ovation

Do you have anymore examples or are you done with your bad faith, and your out of touch of reality and ridiculous semantics ?

Unfortunately I can work you through an example (myself) here, if you ask this question in a non-loaded manner.

[joris]

Well if issues happened to you, this is very unfortunate because you are a long standing & good community member. I’d like to nurtur the good people obviously

[pitmutt]

@skyl

There is a z2z poll here that costs 0.05 ZEC: Free2z interesting experiment in my opinion.

Maybe this is a way of seeing where the community stands. I voted and look forward to seeing the results.

[z.yodler]

@joris

Do you have anymore examples or are you done with your bad faith, and your out of touch of reality and ridiculous semantics ?

I gave a great example. Zwallet/WarpWallet.

Expressing my opinions as a Zcash holder is not bad faith. I disagree with BOSL and gave good examples to support that.

If your only examples are “Rhett” and “scamcoins” then I’d say you are out of touch with devs who have already left, are contemplating leaving, or are uneasy about the precedent of BOSL.

[z.yodler]

@joris

I’d like to nurtur the good people

This is a bit hypocritical there @joris because the Zcash community is filled with “good people” with different opinions.

Not everyone agrees with BOSL or the reasons/logic that Zooko gave. That doesn’t make opponents bad people.

[joris]

OK fair enough, I guess I don’t have the full vision, I pm’ed you.

[dontbeevil]

Does a wallet developer need to directly use zcash/orchard?

Lot of the chat here is focused on hypotheticals. I think the best way forward is when someone who needs to use Orchard repository, open a pull request explaining the reason. I think Zcash developers would be able use MIT licensed Zcash repositories to support Orchard.

[zooko]

Good point — I think it is helpful to focus on known facts more than hypotheticals. Different people can have different imaginations about hypotheticals — fueled by their different ideological beliefs — that are very far apart from each other and can make it hard for them to understand each other or compromise. On the other hand looking at current facts can help bring people together because they’re looking at the same things as each other.

So far in this conversation developers that we’ve heard from include Seth For Privacy, Justin Ehrenhofer, kayabaNerve (all from the Monero community), Rhett Creighton (founder of ZClassic), Dodger (Executive Director and Board Member of the Zcash Foundation, makers of Zebra). And we have the data points of the partnership agreements with Ethereum Foundation, Filecoin Foundation, and Protocol Labs. Who else could we hear from to get current on-the-ground data about this? I would love to hear from Adi of Nighthawk — I consider the Nighthawk Apps project to be one of the most important centers of Zcash support outside of ECC.

Additionally, I’m currently in private negotiations with a number of large and important projects and companies in the crypto industry who might want to form win/win partnerships with Zcash. No promises! They might take a long time — negotiations often do — and they might not pan out — negotiations often don’t — but my hope is to find win/win deals that bring massive benefit to both ZEC holders and to users of the partner project. Based on those conversations, I would say that in most but not all of them, one of the things that they might want is to be able to use Orchard in their project, and so the fact that they can’t without either open-sourcing their entire codebase under BOSL or offering something of value to the ZEC holders might help us get a win/win deal with them. I suspect that trend will increase once we launch Orchard on mainnet in NU5.

[kayabaNerve]

I have already explicitly stated I use a fork of librustzcash which would no longer be considered MIT licensed in my shielded atomic swap implementation just to resolve minor versioning issues. I also recently submitted a version of FROST I was planning on integrating with Zcash, and that may have been best done with (or required) a librustzcash fork which will no longer be an option.

Beyond those comments, there is a moral issue as it’ll no longer be a FOSS stack and be reliant on exemptions, which is a position I don’t care to put my software in.

cc @zooko since I can only reply to a single post here. I would also like to note I’m not “from the Monero community” with my posts here, unless I’m specifically talking about Monero (‘Monero is effectively certainly not interested…’). I’m a member of the Zcash community who’s contributed in a few ways, and even working on a new project which was considering integration, just for all of this discussion to be raised and me to form my opinion on it. I’d appreciate if you didn’t somewhat dismiss me accordingly.

I’ll also say I absolutely do not care about partnerships, not with Zcash, yet with the ECC which you haven’t actually established as providing any more value avenues back, solely expanding the existing one (more money = more code) when you get said more money via removing Zcash’s FOSS status and increasing corporate control in a project which was successfully decentralizing.

Finally, I’d like to note none of Dodger’s questions have been answered, which I’d consider critical to fully understanding the impact of this, and it would’ve been nice for those to at least have been acknowledged with your new post as in progress.

[zooko]

Hi there, kayabaNerve. I wasn’t dismissing you. I think your comments are sincere and that you have valid reasons for what you’re saying. The reason I said you are “from the Monero community” is because that’s what I learned about you when you joined the Zcash community not so long ago, and because you posted this comment yesterday describing something that you’re working on for Monero community.

[kayabaNerve]

Thank you for clarifying. I appreciate it My stance is I’m “also of”, not “from”, and my only posts being “from” were ones such as that commenting on Monero’s activity (a stance I believe also applies to Justin, who notably works for Cake Wallet, a wallet funded by ZOMG for ZEC integration, which I say to note he is a partner to Zcash regardless of Monero without even mentioning his community presence).

[dontbeevil]

@zooko

the fact that they can’t without either open-sourcing their entire codebase under BOSL or offering something of value to the ZEC holders might help us get a win/win deal with them

THIS THIS THIS

[dontbeevil]

@kayabaNerve

which would no longer be considered MIT licensed

I see it is as dual licensed as MIT / Apache here:

GitHub - zcash/librustzcash: Rust-language assets for Zcash

[kayabaNerve]

“under BOSL” is the issue. We still don’t have any confirmation MIT is successfully sub-licenseable from the ECC. Therefore, my shielded atomic swap implementation (which I want to use as an example) can’t legally exist if it requires tweaked versions (as it currently does against the current librustzcash) as I’m not the sole copyright holder and can’t re-license it.

Any GPL projects would also be unable to integrate BOSL work as they definitely aren’t compatible. That’s why there’s also calls for BOSL/GPL dual licensing (as the BOSL is effectively the GPL with a grace period). It’s extremely concerning to wonder why it’s not already dual licensed as it could be described as an artificial integration burden designed solely to limit users while claiming to be a champion of FOSS.

Between the inability for my own contributions to exist under the license change, between being told I can integrate ZEC into my new work yet solely via an exception granted to the ECC which break’s FOSS according to the OSI (though BOSL would probably count as a FOSS license, it’d just force me to not use MIT or even GPL for my work yet a license incompatible with everything else on the planet), and between Zcash not being FOSS (except under BOSL which we still have 0 confirmation anyone can legally sublicense the existing Zcash codebase as), and now one of the two parties in control of the Zcash trademark publicly putting into doubt the contributions of the other as it actively increases corporate control over Zcash by copyrighting consensus critical code, it may simply be time for me to leave this behind. There’s only so much I can do as an individual and if this community doesn’t align, and I try my best to sway it, and it still doesn’t align, it’s up for me to leave.