Switch to GPL

[davout]

I happen to like the GPL. It's a big, beautiful fuck-you to the entire copyright system. That said, I see nothing wrong with the MIT license for the "official" Bitcoin client. Anyone who wants a GPL Bitcoin client badly enough can just take the source code for 0.3.19, make some changes, give his version a different name, and release it under the GPL. No more butthurt.

Licensing and copyright are orthogonal.
+1 for the rest

[FatherMcGruder]

GPL = Communism

Only to the same extent of copyright.

Licensing and copyright are orthogonal.

Not so with copyleft. The whole idea, or at least a big part of it, is to exploit overly extensive copyright protections in order to give those who infringe on the rights of end users a taste of their own medicine.

...Unless I misunderstood you.

[caveden]

GPL-advocates believe that simply by releasing with this license you'd prevent proprietary-software-scams??
Seriously? Do you really think that somebody willing to steal people's money will even bother to know what's the software license?

[mikegogulski]

david@bankbox:~$ bitcoin validateaddress 1F417eczAAbh41V4oLGNf3DqXLY72hsM7
{
    "isvalid" : false
}

Interesting -- the checksum for that address is wrong. Maybe a bug in Bitcoin? The actual address seems to be:
1F417eczAAbh41V4oLGNf3DqXLYBmgs6s

I'm not sending funds to an address with a wrong checksum

SMF bug. The "number of characters left" display on the signature input box appears to be wrong. Someone else had pointed out to me that my address there was invalid, and thought I corrected it by adding a "3" to the end:

1F417eczAAbh41V4oLGNf3DqXLY72hsM73

Should be working now, since I shorted the text in other places.

[ElectricGoat]

GPL-advocates believe that simply by releasing with this license you'd prevent proprietary-software-scams??
Seriously? Do you really think that somebody willing to steal people's money will even bother to know what's the software license?

By releasing under a copyleft licence, you don't prevent abuses, but you make sure that they're illegal.

[davout]

SMF bug. The "number of characters left" display on the signature input box appears to be wrong. Someone else had pointed out to me that my address there was invalid, and thought I corrected it by adding a "3" to the end:

1F417eczAAbh41V4oLGNf3DqXLY72hsM73

Should be working now, since I shorted the text in other places.

Promised BTC sent

[mikegogulski]

Promised BTC sent

Ďakujem!

[dkaparis]

By releasing under a copyleft licence, you don't prevent abuses, but you make sure that they're illegal.

Nothing of the sort, since one can legally implement an abusive client from scratch.

[0x6763]

If anything, GPL slows adoption compared to less restrictive licenses, such as MIT, BSD, or no license/copyright (Public Domain).  People naturally try to make the best (in their own eyes) use of their resources, generally trying to increase their wealth (subjective).  A business that wants to release their own client loses much of their competitive edge if they have to release the source code (and therefore their improvements) to their competitors.  So why would they put the resources into something that won't give them a competitive edge when they have other, more profitable things they can do with their resources?  However, an MIT license allows them to make changes and not release the source to their competitors, which may actually give them an edge over their competition, potentially leading to higher profits.  If you don't have businesses promoting Bitcoin with their software releases, Bitcoin-related services, marketing budgets, etc., what chance does Bitcoin have to become mainstream?  What use is Bitcoin to the mainstream if mainstream businesses don't use it?  Most real life transactions are either consumers to business, or business to business.  Why make Bitcoin less likely to become mainstream by using the GPL license?

My Bitcoin implementation will certainly not be GPL, and will be released in the Public Domain (assuming I don't unwittingly run into problems with any potential future co-developers demanding a license, asserting fallacious claims of control over the real property of myself and others), as I don't believe in initiating (or threatening the initiation of) violence to increase wealth (everything every human does is in attempt to increase their personal wealth in their own eyes), which means I don't believe in government or copyright, as the foundation of government is based on the (threat of) initiation of violence, and all of your open-source licenses are based on copyright laws that require the government.  Until someone accomplishes the impossible and provides a proof that people should initiate violence to get what they want, any beliefs in support of government, copyright, and licenses based on copyright are unfounded, and are nothing more than religion and an attempt to force their religion onto others.

[genjix]

MIT/BSD = Freedom
GPL = Communism

I can do this too:

Bicycles = Freedom
Cars = Communism

Freestyle = Freedom
Backstroke = Communism

Brunettes = Freedom
Blondes = Communism

[neptop]

Asterisk has GNU General Public License
Avidemux has GNU General Public License
Blender has GNU General Public License v2 or later
Cinelerra has GNU General Public License
ffmpeg has GNU LGPL 2.1+, GNU GPL 2+
Gimp has GNU General Public License
GNU Compiler Collection has GNU General Public License (version 3 or later)
LiVES has GNU General Public License version 3 or higher.
MPlayer has GNU General Public License
OpenOffice has GNU Lesser General Public License v3
OpenVPN has GNU GPL
OpenX has GNU General Public License
VirtualDub has GNU General Public License
VLC has GNU General Public License v2 or later
xine has GNU GPL

Want to join the Fun!

BIND is ISC
Compiz is MIT
Enlightenment is BSD
Fluxbox is MIT
GHC and Hugs BSD
Haiku is MIT
lighttpd is BSD
LLVM and clang are BSD
Lua is MIT
ncurses is BSD
nginx is BSD
OpenSSH is BSD
PuTTY is MIT
Tcl is BSD
thttpd is BSD
Tor is BSD
vi is BSD
Webkit is BSD
X11 and most related projects are MIT
Most implementations of Smalltalk are BSD or MIT
Most implementations of JavaScript, as well as jquery and YUI are BSD or MIT
Bittorrent became successful, because they were MIT, libtorrent (base for a big number of clients) is BSD