This is a repost of a post I made in response to a thread about making XmrBazaar open source, however my post redirects the conversation towards open source licensing.
Original thread: https://xmrbazaar.com/forum/topic/293/page/1/
Onion ver: http://xmrbazaar6wzcr3wvj4anpnfwv5tcikgdurtzzfba233g52fa2fjx3qd.onion/forum/topic/293/page/1/
I agree and disagree. On the hand, given the space we're in, making the project open source makes sense, however I also believe that a lot of work has gone into the platform and making it open source means anyone can start a platform that competes with XmrBazaar without having to put in any of the work. Given that this is a platform and not just a simple fediverse instance or a private shop, I think XmrBazaar is better off remaining closed source.
However, that is not to say open source has no place here. The one direction that makes sense is to release a core or community edition which is open source, while not having all the custom features that XmrBazaar has. This way anyone can work on extending it and work on creating add-ons and plugins.
Speaking of the license, we absolutely need a type of license that forbids governments and corporations from using any of the code and tech produced by the open source community. You see this all the time with open source projects. Some corporation comes along, stitches together open source tech without attribution or payment, patents the final product, and then sells it on the open market. This absolutely needs to stop! It is an enormous problem in the open source community and it's about time someone puts a stop to it.
I think this type of license agreement requires far more debate and discussion in the Monero, open source, and darknet communities to define what it can NOT be used for, such as:
- Any government or government affiliate actor can not use the software in any way
- Any corporation can not use the software to create an end product or use it as part of an end product and patent the entirety or the software itself
However, we need proper legal definitions here to ensure there are no workarounds across jurisdictions. I've been thinking about this a lot as I'm working on some projects myself that will eventually become open source and I have absolutely no interest in a government using it, a corporation using it to get rich quick, a company selling the software itself, or products being patented using the software.
One idea I had is to forbid any and all commercial use of the product without acquiring explicit permission. This would effectively prohibit any and all companies, corporations, and commercial actors from ever using the product. That is the explicit rule, while there is an implicit rule too. The implicit rule is that I would never go after legitimate actors, such as people wanting to start their own projects on the darknet and monetize them. Technically, I could legally go after them, but I never would.
Corporations are far more bound to these agreements than actors on the darknet or within the Monero community. I think this absolutely warrants discussion and we need to release an open source license specifically for this. The open source world has been taking advantage of for far too long by corpos, cronies, and corrupt motherfuckers. If the entire open source world effectively started using this new type of license that protects individuals and legitimate businesses, while telling corpos and governments to fuck off, many of these companies would no longer be able to sell their garbage products and it would cost them a fortune to develop it all themselves in house. This would lead to a split between the open source world and the corpo world, which is exactly what needs to happen.
It also opens up a new revenue stream for open source devs. Since corpos now have to acquire explicit permission, the devs could charge them whatever they want just to use the software.
We could start a small group to work on precisely this license type and test it out, then get the community's feedback to close any gaps.
