So apparently the Halo 2 code is released under a supposedly “new” licence: Introducing BOSL, a radically new type of open-source license - Electric Coin Company
This licence was actually written by Zooko in 2007, but whatever.
Did the community have any say in this choice? If so, where? If not, why? We pay ECC for their work.
Welcome, Zcash already exists under open source liscensing and this new liscense (from what I can tell) is designed to help keep it (and/or derivitives) that way but Im not entirely sure, I fail to see the issue here
@zooko
Well, this doesn’t really answer either of those questions.
I don’t recall seeing any information about Halo other than the original 1.0 announcement back at Zcon.
As far as pay goes; this work was done with a grant from the Ethereum Foundation, mentioned in the article you linked.
OK. Why was this new license not discussed with the community?
I also don’t see why the fact that Ethereum Foundation contributed funding should affect the licensing or release. I don’t recall anything in ECC’s original development fee request that specified their ability to differentiate projects based on funding source.
No idea, perhaps @zooko or @nathan-at-least can chime in with thier thinking.
What “development fee request” are you referring to?
OK. Because if ECC intends for this license to be more broadly applied to work funded by the community, this needs to be discussed openly and in detail. A blog post doesn’t suffice.
ECC receives a portion of all block rewards. I am referring to this.
I think the only difference is the stipulation that whatever someone makes out of Halo eventually must be open source as well, you cannot legally clone it into a permanently close source project is what I infer and again fail to see the issue
I think there’s a misunderstanding. I didn’t mention anything about the specific terms of the license. I asked why the community should accept a change in license for research it funds, when there is no input into this process.
If this wasn’t a big deal, why was it not brought up before it happened?
It actually is kind of a big deal but not like how you think, its the same liscense as before that seems to further protect the interests of at least the Zcash community wrt the ECCs research and driving the mission of empowering everyone
I can only guess that it wasn’t mentioned before because its supposed to be a happy surprise which the ECC likes to do sometimes (especially now with the Canopy Countdown!) so please be patient and eventually someone from the ECC will fill in the gaps
Josh S. from ECC is responding to @TheMaxPowerWay in the main Halo 2 announcement thread, making this thread redundant.
If ECC gets free money from the chain, shouldn’t it provide free software in return?