Bitcoin Forum

- Have there been any discussions about licensing Bitcoin client versions?

- Do you think other licensing will limit alternative customer development?

- Will a license reorganization ever happen if Satoshi returns?

this is a free world and you can choose any license you like for the client that you create and people are free to not choose those that don't have a permissive free software license! there are even closed source clients (like Coinomi) around that some people use.

...that is for "clients" though. the Bitcoin itself as a protocol/technology can not have any license but the MIT license that it has.

Adding some more points to pooya87's answer,

Yes, by satoshi himself back in 2010.
Foremost, the client or a wallet is one which doesn't hold our coins. They securely generate our private keys and store them. For in order to spend the coins, we do it through private keys. Hence you can code your own wallet either as a GUI based or command line based and get your own license. But the original satoshi client (i.e Bitcoin Core) is a free software released under MIT License which allows anyone to modify, run and distribute/redistribute the software. Licensing the core client other than MIT License will hinder the adoption of the project significantly reducing the price also.

Yes,licensing the client other than MIT License will limit the adoption and development. satoshi has once spoken about the Licensing of the client and why he doesn't want to go with GPL or other licenses.


No, I believe it doesn't happen since satoshi is not willing to do so. MIT License is very less restrictive when it comes to Free software and hence it is good to continue with MIT itself.

The advantage for MIT over GPL to increase adoption is that with GPL you have to release your derived work under a compatible license. One point is that it must be open source.

Some companies are ok with it but many prefer MIT because they dont have to open source their code. For such a basic protocol like Bitcoin this is neccessary to get as much adoption as possible.

Hey, In the BTC ecosystem there is private soft, but these developments in a standard situation can be compatible with the GPL license. The main problem is that the restrictions that may impede alternative development cannot be called licensing, since this is the way to the absence of an independent library.

That's only true if you publicly redistribute your modification. You can use GPL code internally within a company with proprietary modifications with no need to publish anything. MIT license is basically "new" (current) BSD license where you have no such obligation.