Why BitShares is Public Domain Blog Post
Dec 17, 2014 • Daniel Larimer
"When creating any kind of content whether a blog article or source code, the author has to make a choice about which license to use. This is a very tough decision for many people because, in theory, it impacts your ability to make money from your content. While I haven’t written an article on the subject of intellectual property, many of my opinions are similar to those in the book “Against Intellectual Monopoly” by Michele Boldrin and Davik K. Levine. As you can tell from the title I am very much against intellectual property.
Regardless of my feelings on intellectual property, the fact remains that governments around the world recognize and enforce copyright. If you don’t publish a license then you automatically retain full rights over your work and in theory anyone who uses your work without your permission is guilty of copyright infringement. In some countries you cannot even release your rights.
When it comes to crypto currencies there are many additional factors that come to play. For starters, all serious crypto currency projects must be open source so that the code can be audited and everyone using the system can have confidence in the integrity of the network. Most projects choose some variation of MIT or BSD licenses because they allow commercial and closed source usage and maximize the rate of adoption. Licenses such as GPL are often not used because it would limit adoption among some businesses.
Lets review the BSD license:
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holder>.
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted
provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
duplicated in all such forms and that any documentation,
advertising materials, and other materials related to such
distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed
by the <organization>. The name of the
<organization> may not be used to endorse or promote products derived
from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
The interesting thing about this license is that < copyright holder > reserves all rights and only grants permission to copy or redistribute the software conditionally. In a legal sense there is a owner and that owner is potentially subject to liability.
A crypto currency is designed to be fully decentralized yet there exists a fully centralized owner who has entered a legally enforceable contract with each and every user of the software. In theory the owner of the license could be coerced into revoking it or transferring the license to the government. In theory the government becomes the judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to interpreting and enforcing the contract. This simple license invites the government into the relationship between the creator of the software and the user thereof.
Because BitShares was developed as part of a larger vision to make governments irrelevant, it would be a contradiction to depend upon governments to enforce any kind of software license. BitShares must succeed without any kind of license protection at all.
Limited Liability
As a software developer producing disruptive software that people are depending upon to store millions and hopefully billions of dollars of wealth, there exists tremendous liability on the owner of the software if a fault causes a loss of value to the user. The BSD license attempts to absolve the owner of any liability, but that clause remains subject to interpretation of government courts.
I choose to put BitShares in the public domain because it should be owned by no one and everyone. Once in the public domain governments no longer have jurisdiction over it because there are no contracts to interpret.
If crypto currencies are to be truly free and beyond government control then they need to move beyond software licenses that depend upon government enforcement to have any meaning at all. They need to wake up and realize the internal contradiction. "
The rest of the post can be found below.
http://bytemaster.github.io/update/2014/12/17/Why-Public-Domain.html
