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
Peace
