Value preserving license for community funded work
Earlier today I was having a conversation about funding the work of informal and hypha. I am broadly but not unconditionally supportive of this move. Both informal and hypha have done great things for the hub and I’ll just give a couple of examples: • informal • ICS • hypha • white glove service for consumer chain onboarding Additionally, both teams have been helpful to Notional in security research. I have some questions, too: • funding split between orgs • Current team sizes • Metrics …but I’m of the opinion that these will be sorted out with time. Some have commented that interchain.io should be funding this work, and personally I am conflicted, mainly because what the hub funds for the hub, the hub can own, and keep unique, or choose to receive recurring revenue from other chains on. I would however like to comment that interchain.io should offer more visibility into their internal processes and funding, because this would allow the community to better understand what is going on and where they can contribute. I think that transparency at the ICF would go a long way to reducing the presence of conspiracy theories in the ecosystem. The opacity…
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The MIT has a very clear and immutable condition, which is The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. Replacing that with a set of vaguely defined rules created massive uncertainty for users. Condition one: • How do you define what the Cosmos Hub is? • Who’s the Hub when the blockchain forks? • Where can I find the decisions of the referenced governance? • How do I know if the license is provided to me or a business? • Can the governance withdraw a license later on? But is this a condition? How can I as user ensure this condition is met to know if I can use the software? Condition two: • Seems like Replicated security consumers get a license that Cosmos Hub users have not received yet. • “perpetual” means also when they are not a replicated security customer anymore, right? Not a condition though. Condition three: Sure, kinda implied by 1. But this is not a condition. Condition four: Not a condition either. Licenses typically do not care how software comes into existence but how it can be distributed. So that’s probably out of scope. I’m not a lawyer for sure,…
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I think a much better way for the Hub or other blockchains to protect their IP is write software that is just useless or hard to integrate for others. When you write an application instead of a library, when you write specific instead of generic solutions, when you skip all the prettify APIs and convenient integration docs work, you end up with software that is protected quite well.