Bitcoin Forum

An ever-increasing problem is the blatant ignoring of free software licenses from countries with no real recourse of action against them. Specifically my concern, being the author of cgminer, is that it is free software licensed under the Gnu Public License version 3 and there are now more and more hardware manufacturers from China creating their own forks and distributing binary-only versions of cgminer outside of China without any source code being provided and any requests for source are ignored. (Note that this is NOT universal and there are some manufacturers from China who strictly abide by the guidelines.)

Given the forum has a policy regarding that "Trading of goods that are illegal in the seller's or buyer's country is forbidden", the Chinese manufacturers selling their hardware to clients throughout the world means they are effectively violating this policy. They are using the forum as their main announce/advertising outlet for other countries while abusing the reach of laws that don't affect them across their borders. While cgminer is affected in this way, there is no doubt that with the vast majority of bitcoin-related code being released under free software licenses, that this problem will increase over time.

I've posted this in the public meta section because I wish public discourse on this issue along with hopefully an official stance on this issue.

Ref: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3629.0

I have seen these closed source forks of cgminer too. It's not just a manufacturer thing, seems some altcoin developers have forked it too to mine other hashing algos and closed sourced it likely so they could put in trojans. It never even crossed my mind that cgminer was GPL.

As someone who plans to release software under GPLv3, this is very offputting. It would be nice if there was some way we could deal with this without having to rely on the legal system. Have you tried sending takedown notices to any websites/web hosts that are hosting the infringing software?

The forum should probably remove their threads too if they are providing the software on the forum (IE. they are linking to it).

I have publicly and in private message requested source code on a few occasions and pretty much always been met with silence. There is no direct recourse against them unless they have distributors in the US, Europe etc. On the other hand, allowing them to advertise and sell their products in other continents via this forum is allowing them to contravene the laws abroad. If there are forks out there from people in these countries, using the law there would make it possible for me to send a takedown notice if I'm informed of it (I've not been informed of any so far so what you tell me about altcoins here is news).

Have you tried reporting the posts that include links to the aforementioned software? If so, what was the resulting moderator action, if any?

I am the moderator in the (mining) section concerned which is why I wish this discussed publicly and there be a forum policy set on it if possible before taking any action that involves the forum.

Name and shame is at least a start. I'll be adding software related stuff to the manufacturer trustworthiness thread in a future revision, so we can work on what is useful information (unscored) and what could be scored.

It takes a special kind of asshole to take something alike open-source, then violate the alike provision presumably because they're worried someone will do exactly what they did.

Name&shame sounds like a good course of action. These companies are clearly untrustworthy and should have relevant accounts labeled as such. I don't think bans are really necessary or deletions favorable. I'd be worried about unintended consequences of a hard policy vs. a "decentralized" community response via the trust system. The more exposure the company has on the forum with an extremely negative trust rating, the better.

I'm having it at the moment, everyone is using my pictures willy nilly without even attempting to credit me (which only covers for non profit), ask for permission or license. I've tried to avoid stopping to watermarks but... Searched for ONE image last night and came up with 92 infringements.

I'm not really sure how international law deals with license violators. If I remember correctly, all the UN countries are supposedly obligated to follow a set of official legislation dealing with copyright violation. In essence, that should apply directly to copyleft works as well. However, even if that was the case, some countries (China, for example) flagrantly protect pirates and copyright violators to a legal extent. Since it is difficult to establish which country's laws cover a particular company transacting over the Internet, posts bordering on GPL license violations would have to be arbitrarily decided on by Theymos (and maybe the staff).

You might want to consult with this site (http://gpl-violations.org/faq/violation-faq.html) though. It looks legit, but I only found it via Google, so I would be a bit wary anyway.

Beyond being unethical and stupid, closed source miners are a risk to the ecosystem. What happens when some important update is needed to these devices? Or what if they're shipping with a back door? What if they need fixes to work with p2pool or some other future mining improvement?

Aren't you using monero? There is no open source ATI GPU miner for monero yet. It's one of the things that put me off CryptoNote completely.

Have a look at their thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583449.0

2/4 of the mining softwares listed are closed source.

I think it'd be great to track this sort of stuff, and having a thread calling out known abusers. Would give us a clear list of vendors to boycott.

Dogie, it would be very helpful if you did compile this information as well. Thanks for your efforts on this forum.

I think many users would be very surprised and disappointed by possibly some of their more favourite vendors in such a list since they tend to run hand in hand with production in China and being at the best price point for hardware.

Would you mind listing the others that you are aware of ? Aren't all the A1's abusing your license ? Does Bitmain publish their changes ?

You could conjure the ghost of RMS to haunt them..... or sue them, whatever suits you best.

Aren't you staff? Can't you just moderate them out of existence on this forum? There are dozens of other forums they could sell on but still you would have them gone from here.

The bad thing about proving someone stole your software for a closed source version is you can't really look at the code in their version to tell even though you know it's yours.

All the A1 variants are abusing it, and every single dragon type miner thing and BTC olympus and some LKETC thingy and I lost track of all the other variants coming out since they all started blatantly ignoring my requests and I didn't have the energy to pursue them.

Yes the big surprise is bitmain. They released their S1 code easily, we almost had to beg them to get the S2 code and the S3 code they have silently ignored any requests for code.

Yes I can and that's what this thread is about. If it is deemed they are violating the forum policy I would be able to request they release their source code or threaten to have their threads removed. However there is no policy on this currently and I'm quite sure users would be outraged if I took it upon myself to start deleting all the bitmain threads with a GPL takedown notice without there at least being a forum policy on it being created and some warning.

I think this is a super idea - If you don't comply with cgminer GPL terms, don't expect to use these forums as a platform for selling your wares.

There is an excellent post here concerning this very issue & highlighting ckolivas's (as well as most miners, I think) concerns:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=417159.msg8382331#msg8382331

I believe public pressure should be applied in the first instance and, if that fails, some kind of moderation warning before any ban should be considered - and even then only in extreme cases or when these manufacturers are blatantly up to no good. Public humiliation is a very powerful tool that has served the Bitcoin community here well so far on previous occasions.

Something must be done for sure  ;)

Make a poll to see what people think? I'd personally be in support of you.

I have experienced this with the Chinese in other products....they generally don't provide good documentation and their response to requests for information is generally, "you don't need to know that to operate the equipment"

cultural thing I guess

that said I feel they are obligated to abide by the terms of the license since they benefited from the work ckolivas did

I support a ban should they not comply

valid concerns for sure

i suspect that although i live in the us and rarely travel my reading tells me of a lot of piracy in other countries and it is just the way things are done

we can ban all the abusers , boycott them , not use thier products

in the bitcoin arms race if someone comes up with a unit that can out perform other units  there will still be people waiting in line to buy it months in advance no matter what stand is taken i fear,

hopefully i am wrong

Now take off and nuke from orbit.

OK - after reading IYFTech's post I decided to join in & give the name & shame idea a try:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=671189.msg8397217#msg8397217

Any & all support would be appreciated, let's see if we can shame them into towing the line...... ;)

Fair enough, I'll join in with this - let's see where this goes.......

If you give me a full list of companies and their compliance, along with specifically what you need companies to do I'll see what I can do.

Actually you have about 10x as much hardware as me from many different manufacturers in your reviewing efforts. I suspect you'll be able to generate that list easier than me. Create a list of what runs cgminer  (which is most hardware now) and we can take it from there. You'll probably be suitably disapointed by the lack of GPL compliance of a lot of that hardware too.

It might be more appropriate to send formal cease and desist notices to violating hardware manufacturers, and send DCMA infringement notices (yes, you can send DCMAs for GPL violations (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2007/12/mpaas-university-toolkit-hit-with-dmca-takedown-notice-after-gpl-violation/)) to Bitcointalk for the removal of the threads.

Also, send DCMA takedowns to *where* they host the cgminer binaries.

This is a legal issue (even though we all know it is clear cut) and should be handled formally.

Bitmaintech.com resolves to 119.9.72.212 which is an APNIC IP allocated to Rackspace in Hong-Kong

Since the DMCA is US Law, I am not sure jurisdiction applies

However, their domain registrar is Godaddy and their DNS servers are hosted in Arizona which is under US jurisdiction.

I would suggest sending a takedown notice to Godaddy

If you need help in formatting a correct takedown, send me a PM and I can help.

I'm in favor of this as well.

Would Google comply with a takedown request in removing their links from search?

I am opposed to all intellectual property, including copyleft licenses.

From a natural rights perspective: Intellectual property is not real property because it has no scarcity, and there is therefore no such thing as intellectual property rights. If we lived in a world without scarcity, where anything could be conjured up instantly with no cost, then the concept of property would be nonsensical because there would never be any conflict between people who wanted to use the same thing. Such a world is impossible for physical items because some things like original Gutenberg bibles or bitcoins are inherently scarce, but we already live in a post-scarcity world for information. I can copy and use any data without stopping you from using your copy of the data. So you have no right to prevent me from using my real property to duplicate and distribute any data, even if you created it, and even if the data is only protected by a copyleft license. (Unless I explicitly agreed to follow your conditions, but a notice in a file is not a contract.)

Source code licenses are especially ridiculous because you're saying that you own the result of some instructions that you've published, even though you don't even publish these results. (Source code being instructions for the compiler in producing object code.)

From a consequentialist perspective: If there was no copyright, then the producers of copyrighted content would have less incentive to produce content, but the free availability of ideas would probably inspire even more innovation and prosperity. In cgminer's case, maybe these hardware companies would have had to charge more for their hardware or been unable to create a product at all if they'd been required to publish their changes. I don't see how the world would be be improved if these companies were forced to expend resources to publish their modified cgminer code. (Would the changes even be useful for anyone else? I imagine that they're pretty hardware-specific.)

(I'm pretty bad at arguing things like this, so I doubt I convinced anyone here, but hopefully you at least understand my position.)

I recognize that it'd be ethically OK for the forum to support IP even if government-enforced IP is unethical, but I believe that fighting IP is good here for the same reasons that it's good elsewhere. Therefore, copyright violations should not be removed from the forum except where required by law. (Moderators should not deal with legal stuff, though. If posts on the forum violate cgminer-related copyright, send me a DMCA complaint and I will deal with it if necessary.)

 It seems to me the point of the takedown notice was to remove posts from THIS website.  ie bitcointalk.org
Mods can do that but ckolivas is looking for confirmation of his proposal.

 If I may, however,
 Why is it that when it directly involves a moderator (however valid the argument may be) we will do something about it yet we merely get a "Caveat Emptor" post by gmaxwell in the Bitcoin Mining section.  KNOWN scam artist are allowed to hawk their wares even when they have nothing to hawk!  If it weren't for Dogie, newbies would be ripe for the pickings... hell maybe they still are!  

 I agree that what they have done is wrong and, in many jurisdictions, illegal but if we're going to talk about shutting down Bitmain for GPL V 3.0 violations, then we have to talk seriously about shutting down several others for stealing peoples money and continuing to do so even as I write.

a DMCA takedown notice won't affect this forum, and it's unnecessary.  All that is needed is for the admins/mods to agree that the content is in violation of the forum policies

what I am suggesting  would do much more to get their attention.  Under DMCA, ckolivas can request a takedown of their domain hosting the infringing content which would also have the chilling effect of shutting down their sales site.

Since he is the copyright owner, this would need to be initiated by him 

Amazing what a bit of noise can do eh? Nice one  :)

If it is that easy to get the big players to play ball, the rest will follow. I'm very happy that the community was able to come together and get this result, much faster than I anticipated - well done everyone!!

By the way, let's not confuse Open Source with Copywrong - they are two completely different & opposite subjects that couldn't be more farther apart.  ;)

Amazing!  Now can we extend the conversation to KNC deliveries/refunds?  BFL deliveries/refunds? Cointerra... aw forget it!

Yes,  Rackspace follows DMCA. Rackspace has a US division at least, and as such Rackspace US is subject to the jurisdiction of the US as far as DMCA is concerned.  I'm not well versed but DMCA may in fact apply to all websites accessible by US visitors,  similar to financial licenses, etc.

Google will remove specific links that contain infringing content,  not whole domains.

Most people are unaware of their copyright/copyleft protection powers. I think that it is totally valid to publish the source code of a software, with the conditions requiring any modifications to be also shared and be freely available. Nobody is forced to use or modify something licensed under GPL or another license.  They did not release their work for you to do what you want, they released it under specific conditions. The question of scarcity is irrelevant - these licenses encourage duplication and sharing, not limit them.

Other forms of IP protection such as patents are a different issue,  as they are not what is essentially a private contract (like copyright) in spirit.


Anyway, providers will probably release their sources when you name and shame, and if that doesn't work try DCMAing the infringing content.

I think we disagree greatly then if you see copyleft as the same as copyright. GPL is not about protecting intellectual property for one person but for opening up that property for everyone's benefit in the quest for sharing of knowledge to increase the global pool of knowledge and is nothing to do with the original author protecting his pockets.

Irrespective of that I'm not asking for cgminer to be singled out for special treatment, but I do wish to point out that code from hardware manufacturers has been incorporated into cgminer on many occasions and as a result the codebase for that hardware and all its users has improved dramatically as a result, benefiting from both the knowledge of the authors of cgminer who know mining more intimately even than the hardware manufacturers, and the ability to benefit from improvements to the codebase at large, including bug, and more importantly, security updates.

We will continue to poll manufacturers who blatantly disregard the GPL on cgminer and if they do not abide then I will personally be sending you the DMCA takedown notice instead of acting myself.

I do not wish to be compromised in my ability to act as the author of cgminer and protect everyone's knowledge under the GPL nor to have it affect my actions at trying to be impartial as a moderator.

Theymos, I think you have completely misunderstood the issue at hand.

The issue we have is (as ckolivas explained above) the GPL license requirements.
Those license requirements are firstly stated clearly in many places on the internet, are referenced in the header of most of the files in cgminer, and are to ensure the freedom of the software under the GPL, to stop someone from taking away that freedom.
I do think you need to read up and understand what the GPL is - you do seem to not know what it is based on your comment.
That license does require a small amount of effort to adhere to it.
That effort is to simply provide the source for the binary supplied to others - to ensure that the freedom of the software continues.

Aside: heh, I've stayed away from the forum for a while to work on a project of free software that anyone will be able to use, and come back to see this.
(... and yes the secondary reason I've done that is because there is also a sponsor paying with money for my time to work on this free software that will be available to all ...)

If you wish to enforce these GPL3 licences as they are intended to, you might have significantly more success in putting legal pressure on commercial resellers, if the manufacturer is out of legal reach.

Anything that hurts the bottom line (and naming and shaming is one of them) will make the hardware manufacturer consider and hopefully do the right thing.


If distributing this software without source code is a crime, reselling miners with that software (thereby distributing it) might also be considered illegal.

As a fellow developer and EFF donator, I thank you very much for that.

This is a nice take, which might be brilliant, since after all the reseller is distributing that software, so he must comply with the license too.

First off - welcome back Kano  :)

As kano has, I believe, correctly pointed out - there seems to be more than a little confusion about what Open Source is, as well as what it stands for. I will admit that my personal feelings are that all knowledge, ideas & culture should be freely available to everyone who so desires it, to be able to share whatever they want with whoever they want, whenever they want & however they want, if what they are sharing was acquired legitimately, ie - from someone who shared it with them in the first place. It is the sharing of ideas, knowledge & information that moves us forward & creates better ideas - improving, empowering & enabling us to make things better for the benefit of everyone - for free.
Bitcoin itself is Open Source, anyone can use it, copy it, experiment with it and thus help improve it - and it is this very aspect that has enabled it to grow & improve at the massively exponential rate that it has done, and continues to do today - because there are no constraints on it's use & anyone can access it. Now, I see people talking of Copywrong/left/right, DMCA notices, takedown requests etc, etc. All these terms are born of, and continue to be used in conjunction with a 300+ year old draconian English Law that was aimed at preventing "just anyone" from reading and learning from books and scriptures, thus educating themselves and sharing that knowledge with others, restricting access to those books & scriptures to a select few - thus empowering them only so as to become what was then considered wise & knowledgeable so as to more easily control the masses. Pretty clever eh?
Now move on 300+ years into the digital age & the internet, where masses of knowledge, ideas, culture & information can be sent around the world in a millisecond to anyone. Everything in the world has changed apart from Copywrong/left/right, which is still based on the same 300+ year old English decree & expected to work, only now the select few are Governments & Corporations who are no longer interested in protecting the "Rights Holder" (not that they ever were  ::)), but more in lining their own pockets, stifling competition & restricting the flow of information in case something embarrassingly true came out (as it frequently does, thanks to certain heroic & brave individuals), and disguising it as "Copywrong/left/right protection" - when in all truth, no matter how you look at it - it's Censorship & always has been.
What do you think would have happened if a certain Satoshi had filed for a Patent on Bitcoin? I'll tell you, nothing. It would have died in the water there and then. But because it was made Open Source, it took off - and only because it was Open Source - no other reason whatsoever. When I see people posting about DMCA notices, I don't know weather to laugh or cry. One simply has to go to  https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/  to see that, like the Copywrong/left/right system, the DMCA take down system is unworkable and has failed, as it is now being used by the same Governments & Corporations to immediately remove anything that they either don't like, don't agree with, that undermines them (ie the truth), is too competitive, is a better product than theirs, etc, etc. It has become a completely legal type of internet Censorship.
For instance, imagine if ck suddenly released an updated miner that outperformed every other miner by twice the hash rate, all it would take is a single DMCA take down notice and BANG - it's gone, leaving ck a very long, hard & expensive battle just to prove that it wasn't a Copywrong violation - and these requests can be made by absolutely anyone. The fact that it is under the GPLv3 License means nothing - there have been many fake takedown requests granted against GPLv3 material, an example:  https://torrentfreak.com/hbo-asks-google-to-take-down-infringing-vlc-media-player-130715/  Just look at the statistics, so far this month there have been over 30,143,926 (that's 30 million, half way through the month) DMCA requests made to Google, then go to  https://torrentfreak.com/google-processes-millions-of-useless-dmca-notices-140715/  and try and work out how many of those are deliberately fake, false or downright lies. So please, let's just forget the Copywrong/DMCA thing, going down that road would be suicide. Bitcoin has got this far because it and everything to do with it is Open Source, trying to introduce archaic, broken, unworkable and flawed 300+ year old rules is not a forward step by any stretch of the imagination.

So, back to the problem. As I said, Bitcoin is Open Source, and it is imperative for it's continued future success that it and everything else to do with it be kept that way. It was demonstrated earlier this week that name & shame, community pressure and the odd LOUD posting had the desired affect with Bitmain - but this is not enough. I believe education of the Bitcoin community is an even more effective/important way of achieving everyone's aim, as well as making the whole Bitcoin eco-system more secure & knowledgable. For example, I and others have asked dogie to introduce a marking system for manufacturers who comply & promote Open Source software with their products, but that's just a slice of what we can do. Warnings about the hazards, risks & vulnerabilities of closed source software could be spread all over the forum to help educate the mass of noobs currently flocking to this wonderful Bitcoin world we have all created. There really is no limit as to what we can do if we pull together as we have been doing since Satoshi had a little brainwave.

There is one thing that I think we are all in agreement with: That the whole community get behind ck & kano in the meantime, back them up in any way we can to ensure that the manufacturers know and realize that the Bitcoin community is 100% behind the people who have supported us since the beginning, and that there will be zero tolerance of any closed source copywronged stolen nonsense that we can't access to see what's going on inside it.

If you got to this last sentence - I applaud you, I nearly didn't make it here myself. This is just my 30,143,926 cents, I hope I haven't offended anyone, but if I have.......send me a take down notice  :D :D

Peace  :)

I didn't say that it is. I don't doubt that GPL proponents are interested in helping the community as a whole. But that doesn't mean that the GPL is right.

With normal copyright, I can't distribute your work at all. With copyleft, I can distribute it, but I'm forced to do additional work to distribute the source code. The latter is much better, but you're still unjustly exerting control over my real property to protect your intellectual property. It is irrelevant whether you intend the license to benefit just yourself or the community as a whole -- it's still wrong to violently (via government) force me to contribute to your project just because I modified/used your copyrighted code.

Open source is often good, but the GPL is not. I use permissive licenses when publishing my own stuff, and the new forum software will use the MIT license.

Unfortunately this is borderline deluded rant, although built on the good intentions, the same that are used to pave the hell.

Miner software is just a lightweight shim around the fundamentally closed hardware of the ASIC. Perhaps the new readers need to be reminded about the timebomb that eldentyrell had placed in his FPGA miners, while keeping all the software open.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49971.0

While I generally support the goals of GPLv3 (and ckolivas in particular), the supporters need to be grounded in reality, and periodically reminded about the fact that software needs hardware to run. In particular people who claim to run "all-open-source stack" aren't doing so unless there's no HDD/SSD in their machines or they really replaced the firmware in their disks.

The really effective GPLv3 enforcement needs to rely on standardizing the interface between the software and the hardware, not on more harassment of the hardware vendors. To further this goal cgminer needs to be made more modular and clearly delineate the "mining drivers" from the "mining kernel". Baking them together is a throwback to about 1960 or so.

Well, that's quite easy to do, when you have thousands of BTCs to pay for it.

I'm telling my Mum on you  :'(

Sorry, man. You've started beautifully, but then just finished of the rocker (or of the rails).

Its like all those "open source" people who say that Raspberry Pi is all "open" and neglect to discuss that the Alphamosaic VideoCore is a primary CPU on the chip and the ARM is just an ASP (Attached Support Processor).

First couple of "groundings in reality" may hurt, but I assure you that you will learn to watch your step and understand the technology and the common traps.

Thank you Obi-Wan  :D :D

This may be the case, but it is just as capable of doing some serious damage, as this example of a dodgy compiled sgminer binary shows:


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=719526.0   - and demonstrates perfectly everything that the cgminer devs want to avoid, and I believe what PatMan was trying to highlight. Of course, the majority of users here would never download anything from an unofficial source, let alone use it - yet here we all are running Bitmain software with known security holes in the miner software thinking everything is fine & dandy?! So although you, or anyone else for that matter, may not agree 100% with what PatMan says (which isn't surprising, given the length of it  ;D), I think your description of it being a "deluded rant" might be a little OTT, even though it was said in a joking fashion.....still, he took it well  :D
I'd hazard a guess that 90% of noobs don't know how to use a MD5 checksum, let alone a decompiler to check what they just downloaded, they just "trust" that it's OK. If every manufacturer abides by what ever terms of the software license, and users were all made aware of the importance of Free & Open Source - the chances of the above happening would be drastically reduced, that's for certain.  :)

While I understand (and commiserate) with your argument, I don't think that this is what being "open source" is all about and what was the main thought of ckolivas, kano and the quoted portion of PatMan's message that I ridiculed.

I understand that ckolivas is (or was) also a Linux kernel developer/committer and he must have heard and read the arguments within the Linux community about the "bag-of-drivers" enabled/disabled with the preprocessor macros. So I'm not going to repeat that discussion here. Linux, like almost every other operating system designed after the end of sixties, has a concept of loadable driver module, and nobody is seriously discussing getting rid of that technology.

{ Small aside: if anyone is going to use the word "plugin" to describe "loadable driver module" I'm going to ridicule him for complete lack of understanding of hardware }

Obviously I cannot speak for ckolivas and/or kano; and I cannot know their goals in life and in developing cgminer under GPLv3 in particular. I just hope that they understand the progress of technology and they never ventured to be nothing but a Cerberus guarding a bag-of-drivers. I know that within the Linux community there's plenty of wanna-be Cerberuses and that subset has spilled over here, or into crypto-coin mining in general.

It's really not a problem, no offense was meant (I believe) or taken. I deliberately made it clear at the beginning of my post/rant/chapter that these were purely my personal opinions.

For me, I'm just happy that others are supporting ck & kano, as well as OS. Keep posting  :)