Beyond wanting actual confirmation from Ian or another party who can confirm, I’d like to note that Tezos paying them for advice on a Sapling integration, while worthy of disclosure to the public in my opinion, does not create a conflict of interest with how Orchard should be handled unless Tezos suggested/stated they’d also pay for Orchard IMO (not a lawyer though, so more commenting on my opinion on what’s notable as a conflict).
As for Sealance, there are other private transaction protocols out there. While they don’t appear to have anything public, so you appear to making claims about closed room discussions they may be having, I can’t comment on the usage of the term “shielded” nor can I comment on the setup being trustless, I know I recently saw a Chinese research paper on a Monero fork with government accessible transaction data though.
I’d also ask, as you made sure to disclose, if your relationship with Tezos does not mean you should recuse yourself from the licensing of Orchard, as Orchard is presumably tech they’d be interested in, your advisory position puts you in a prime position to sell a license to them (an ability you only have thanks to the BOSL license you advocate for). While that’d be a boon for the ECC. and therefore isn’t really a conflict of interest on that level, I’d argue it is a conflict of interest for Zcash as a whole when I assume the ECC pays you a salary?
As for trademark allowances, personally, I’d hope it’s guaranteed Zcash remains free software under OSI approved licenses, as the OSI OSD is acknowledged, which does mean rejecting usage of the trademark for any software where core code isn’t licensed accordingly. TM rejections on upgrades seems to be an explicitly established right of both the ECC and the ZFND which the ZFND may or may not execute.
While I hope for your questions to be answered, I also hope you answer Dodger’s extensive questions, and I also hope you answer my question on whether or not this is actually up to the community like you’ve so far claimed.
As a side note, the last three posts on your blog have been inflammatory and purely consisting of secondhand accounts and conjecture without any actual evidence. The best was a tweet (without direct evidence) which wasn’t clear on why the supposed payment was made, where the accused party clarified they did not make any payment for the purposes you wrote about, and a set of PMs (again without direct evidence) which claims they couldn’t even access the original messages. It’s quite exhausting to see what feels like a resurgence of Robespierre. Can everyone please agree, as a general premise, to not use unverifiable conjecture as a basis for discussion on these forums?
