Author Topic: What if I don't like Cryptonomex and BitShares 2.0?  (Read 17513 times)

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Offline fuzzy

Let me try to clear a few of these up:

1.  Invictus ran out of donated BTC at the end of last year.  All PTS was returned on advice of our accountants.
2.  During recent months 100% delegates have earned about 4277 BTS * $0.006 = $25 per day.  (BitShares paid for 1/2 hour every day)
(Enough for them to answer a few questions or fix a simple bug every day or so.)
3.  By dipping into our BTS reserves set aside for legal, accounting, and government contingencies, I3 was able to provide a small stipend for some of them amounting to about 3 paid hours per day.  To meet the rest of their living expenses, they were forced to live off their savings from last year.
4.  This left them somewhere around 8 unpaid hours a day as independent agents.  With this time, the team continued to provide essential updates for BitShares and worked on Graphene with the hope of producing something of value that could be used to recover all their sacrificed pay.  This was a huge gamble.  It would have been smarter to take a job at Google, use their new salaries to buy up cheap BTS.  Instead they stuck with it.   Net cash flow during all this time was from the developers to BitShares, not the other way around.
5.  When it became clear that Graphene would be a success, the team decided to build a new company to monetize it and recover their painful losses.
6.  ALL of the current stakeholders in Cryptonomex are members of the global BitShares community who invested their own time and/or money to make Graphene possible.
7.  It is CNX intention to use the results of these risky investments to raise additional capital and capture new revenue streams.  To do that, we need to have a company that owns something that merits such investment.  That's why we have the license structure you see.  Failure to assert those IP rights would mean that BitShares would need to find developers able to take Graphene the rest of the way for $25/day.  We were, alas, not able to find anybody willing to continue doing that.
8.  For the foreseeable future we expect to continue using such outside investments to grow the BitShares ecosystem in a way that incentivizes investment in CNX.
9.  Please observe the complete series of announcements we make this summer before you judge our commitment to BitShares success.  :)

 +5% +5% +5%

I'm actually sometimes thinking maybe the devs should have taken the lucrative jobs working for google, purchased bts, worked on it part time and recruited other talented devs from Google to work with them.  I mean isn't that kind of how mozilla came to be? 
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Offline cylonmaker2053

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Let me try to clear a few of these up:

1.  Invictus ran out of donated BTC at the end of last year.  All PTS was returned on advice of our accountants.
2.  During recent months 100% delegates have earned about 4277 BTS * $0.006 = $25 per day.  (BitShares paid for 1/2 hour every day)
(Enough for them to answer a few questions or fix a simple bug every day or so.)
3.  By dipping into our BTS reserves set aside for legal, accounting, and government contingencies, I3 was able to provide a small stipend for some of them amounting to about 3 paid hours per day.  To meet the rest of their living expenses, they were forced to live off their savings from last year.
4.  This left them somewhere around 8 unpaid hours a day as independent agents.  With this time, the team continued to provide essential updates for BitShares and worked on Graphene with the hope of producing something of value that could be used to recover all their sacrificed pay.  This was a huge gamble.  It would have been smarter to take a job at Google, use their new salaries to buy up cheap BTS.  Instead they stuck with it.   Net cash flow during all this time was from the developers to BitShares, not the other way around.
5.  When it became clear that Graphene would be a success, the team decided to build a new company to monetize it and recover their painful losses.
6.  ALL of the current stakeholders in Cryptonomex are members of the global BitShares community who invested their own time and/or money to make Graphene possible.
7.  It is CNX intention to use the results of these risky investments to raise additional capital and capture new revenue streams.  To do that, we need to have a company that owns something that merits such investment.  That's why we have the license structure you see.  Failure to assert those IP rights would mean that BitShares would need to find developers able to take Graphene the rest of the way for $25/day.  We were, alas, not able to find anybody willing to continue doing that.
8.  For the foreseeable future we expect to continue using such outside investments to grow the BitShares ecosystem in a way that incentivizes investment in CNX.
9.  Please observe the complete series of announcements we make this summer before you judge our commitment to BitShares success.  :)

 +5% +5% +5%

Offline Stan

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Without BM & team BitShares is probably dead, and we can't blame them if they want to get paid for their work.
^THIS.
However, the OP of this new thread avoids many other issues being discussed.

EDIT: For the record I started drafting this post prior to the 20 that were posted before this one appeared!

AGS / PTS
For those that claim AGS / PTS investors have an expectation of ownership I say they shouldn't. It was all a donation based contribution to fund the creation of the BitShares ecosystem. You can split hairs on whether that has been accomplished but in my book it was. Is it perfect? No. Could it be improved? Of course, but that's always true. So what?
Have all of those funds been spent? If so when did they run out, before or after work on graphene was well underway?

This issue keeps coming up. Many never really backed the merger and many have since changed their minds about it. Although all funds collected through AGS / PTS had no contractual, official obligations, we all know that was necessary to keep the dev staff legal. That made it an issue of trust and integrity that I3 would do what they claimed. If the trust wasn't there the investments wouldn't have been either. The way people measure integrity is subjective. Some people feel that trust was violated. That is one reason why this issue keeps recurring.

Current Funding of Dev Staff
What about the delegate pay the devs are receiving right now? Is that bonus money to develop 2.0? Is it repaying a perceived deficit from low marketcap? Going towards 0.9.x expenses? Just what are those exactly? Some may feel they are subsidizing proprietary software development. Full disclosure about this doesn't seem unreasonable, but this issue hasn't been explicitly addressed.

Controlling Interests of Cryptonomex
The community has not been fully informed about Cryptonomex's obligations. CNX is a new entity but we are largely in the dark about it and that makes some people nervous. What conditions did the investors of Cryptonomex require to fund the company? Are those obligations in conflict with past expectations (implied) for BitShares?

To say the community should have a strong sense of gratitude towards BM & the core devs for the very existence of this ecosystem is a major understatement. Are they being generous towards this community or only trying to protect their own investments of time & money? I think it's a bit of both, and I see nothing wrong with that.

I am surprised by the lack of depth of the OP in dealing with the issues raised in various threads, including these.

Let me try to clear a few of these up:

1.  Invictus ran out of donated BTC at the end of last year.  All PTS was returned on advice of our accountants.
2.  During recent months 100% delegates have earned about 4277 BTS * $0.006 = $25 per day.  (BitShares paid for 1/2 hour every day)
(Enough for them to answer a few questions or fix a simple bug every day or so.)
3.  By dipping into our BTS reserves set aside for legal, accounting, and government contingencies, I3 was able to provide a small stipend for some of them amounting to about 3 paid hours per day.  To meet the rest of their living expenses, they were forced to live off their savings from last year.
4.  This left them somewhere around 8 unpaid hours a day as independent agents.  With this time, the team continued to provide essential updates for BitShares and worked on Graphene with the hope of producing something of value that could be used to recover all their sacrificed pay.  This was a huge gamble.  It would have been smarter to take a job at Google, use their new salaries to buy up cheap BTS.  Instead they stuck with it.   Net cash flow during all this time was from the developers to BitShares, not the other way around.
5.  When it became clear that Graphene would be a success, the team decided to build a new company to monetize it and recover their painful losses.
6.  ALL of the current stakeholders in Cryptonomex are members of the global BitShares community who invested their own time and/or money to make Graphene possible.
7.  It is CNX intention to use the results of these risky investments to raise additional capital and capture new revenue streams.  To do that, we need to have a company that owns something that merits such investment.  That's why we have the license structure you see.  Failure to assert those IP rights would mean that BitShares would need to find developers able to take Graphene the rest of the way for $25/day.  We were, alas, not able to find anybody willing to continue doing that.
8.  For the foreseeable future we expect to continue using such outside investments to grow the BitShares ecosystem in a way that incentivizes investment in CNX.
9.  Please observe the complete series of announcements we make this summer before you judge our commitment to BitShares success.  :)







« Last Edit: June 16, 2015, 01:20:06 am by Stan »
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Offline mint chocolate chip

So I listened to the mumble, and I have to say one thing struck me as something that seems rather important but was quickly brought to consensus based on the okays of two or three people in attendance.

Migration comes up around the 40:00 mark of https://soundcloud.com/beyond-bitcoin-hangouts/beyond-bitcoin-06-12-2015-dev-hangout-s3 and someone asks about the default referrer for all current account holders.

BM states that that has been an internal discussion topic with only two options, mark each account as either Null or mark each account as CMX as the referrer, since that would reward the developers for setting up the faucet, for their development efforts, and that they "in practice referred everyone that is here today".

I am not sure that my account was setup with the faucet, in fact it and many others were setup before the faucet existed and I think I and others paid our own registration fee via a transfer from an exchange or from onceuponatime or other members.

Regardless, this is a very big decision to give all the referral income to CMX, a company that did not exist until recently. I would think that if the referrals were marked as null, that possibly six or seven digit referral revenue would flow back into BitShares (as a burn or the worker pool). I do not want to not reward the developers who have done an amazing job and have created a truly brilliant system that will provide plenty of referral opportunities for us all going forward, but I do not think something of this level of importance should be glossed over either. Frankly, there were a lot of other people who referred users to the system, and arbitrarily giving 100% of all current account holders referral revenue to CMX is something we should be discussing.

In the future, there possibly may be other non-referred users, who is given that referral credit, is it given to CMX automatically or is it null... for example, I asked about BitShares.org after Stan posted about it being public and have distanced themselves from it, and have not gotten a response https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,16889.msg216043.html#msg216043 so maybe this is something we should be discussing as this is a potential opportunity for the BitShares DAC to profit as there will be a large percentage of users who land on the website as their first exposure to BitShares via links or search.

Offline fuzzy

I mean...let's face it.  Even PTS still is in the top 65 of all altcoins...so just imagine what people will begin thinking about bitcoin's fate when there are 20-30 different bitshares-powered chains in the top 100 on coinmarketcap...and one is very similar to their own philosophies...

My belief is that people should be free to exist in the system they feel best matches their personality.  If they are an anarchist, they should have a bitshares version that reflects that...as long as they have devs who will support it.  If they are communist...or socialist.. the same applies.

Why? Because the MOST value comes from synergies between PEOPLE with like minds and similar passions...not a given system of belief that forces everyone to join or face punishment.

Do the devs really think this would hurt them in the long run?  I can't see how it could...because ultimately they are going to all want to be snatched up and paid large sums of money for being capable of innovating to the level this team has accomplished...so even if there are 100 dpos chains like bitshares...but with different devs and philosophies...guess who is going to be in the history books for creating the crypto gold standard DPOS would become?  You got it....the devs!  I'm sure they will find work making plenty of money...and will be able to look at these days as "paying their dues" to earn a reputation of gold in a very lucrative industry.

What did Bruce Lee say again?  Oh yeh..."Be like Linux, my friend"...or something like that :P
« Last Edit: June 16, 2015, 01:25:01 am by fuzzy »
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Offline CryptoPrometheus

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Sovereignty means "having supreme power of authority over a domain". How exactly would we (the holders of BTS) be losing our sovereignty when we have never had "sovereignty" over the BTS code to begin with?  BitShares code, up to this point, has always been public domain. Nobody has sovereignty over it, anyone can use it for any reason, that's the whole point of public domain.
Sovereignty isn't usually a concept used with code so it should be obvious that its usage was rhetorical and not meant to lead to ethimological debate. Using code which property rights we don't own and that we aren't allowed to license and reuse is very much akin to a loss of sovereignty as compared to the current situation where we can do as we see fit with the code base.

Who is this "we" that should have the right to license or re-use the Graphene toolkit? Holders of BTS? Anybody in the world? Are you saying that currently, holders of BTS are allowed to license the BTS code? That is not true. Sure, anybody can freely copy or re-use the BTS toolkit - but what does that have to do with BTS? Does this benefit the holders of BTS? No, it only benefits others who want to freely use something that they have not worked, paid for or contributed to, for their own potential benefit. Perhaps they may choose to sharedrop, perhaps not.

Furthermore, are you suggesting that somehow BTS users will not be allowed to alter the Graphene toolkit for the future benefit of the BTS chain? That is also not true, since BTS will be licensed to do so. The reality is, the only people that this does not benefit are people that want to copy and re-use the BTS code for free and then compete directly with BTS.

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Offline cylonmaker2053

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As a shareholder i prefer to see supreme effort focused on core value propositions, which in our case as BTS is a p2p asset exchange. That's what the DAC does well, and if this merger brings better tech to make the user/customer experience better, then i fully support it. it sounds like there's potential to reduce added value propositions as the org grows, but i'd take better focus and resources on the core capability any day over losing options for future tangential ventures...ESPECIALLY when we're in a bear market that kicked the shyt out of our market cap. It's time to buckle down, scrape for available synergistic resources (like CNX), and press hard on making our core business better. After trolling all these heated threads today, i'd just like to say i think the merger looks like the right move. There's no reason why other DAC ventures can't evolve from this same community after BTS really succeeds and we can pay for our lattes w/bitUSD!

Offline fuzzy

The community ending up split between two chains would be a disaster, imo.  It looks bad to outsiders, its very confusing, and it means that people are needlessly duplicating effort instead of working together.

Lets avoid that.
That happened between Ripple and Stellar. It wasn't at all a disaster.
If each chain has a well identifiable brand, people will just perceive SmartCoin/Graphene/CryptonomexCoin as a new currency from the award winning creators of BitShares and learn to like it for its own merits and hate it for its own defaults.

The problem in that partiular case of BitShares is that BitShares always defined itself as a free software project with libertarian leanings so doing a 180 degree turn to become a proprietary project with commercial endeavour is likely to get it red flagged beyond repair in the crypto community. Look at the amount of flak Ripple got for doing things not remotely as controverrsial as what we are discussing now...

I'm actually of the belief that we should have the ability to disagree and fork bitshares so that these chains generally represent the spectrum of philosophical leanings. In fact that is what I loved about the concept of Sharedropping from the very beginning.  I actually have expected for a long time that the community and maybe even some of the devs would split off and form different chains, sharedropping a % on BTS/AGS/PTS  holders in a way that enables them to have ownership in each chain and the underlying philosophy each one represents. 

Then the stakeholders currently here can decide which chains to divest in and which to buy into further.  Over time you'd have chains that started out with similar foundational technology but that would compete based on philosophy (communist, capitalist, socialist...etc). 

So if you believe that BM and the team are going to do something that is outside of your philosophical comfort zone...or that you think will make the chain value far less...you sell your stake in that chain and buy fully into the one that sharedropped 100% on you and has a development team with a philosophy more in line with your own. 

It would be akin to having the ability to easily move from country  to country FREELY without having to worry about anything except whether or not you think your original country is worth keeping a second home there...

Some might be uncertain and thus would keep equal stake in all of them thinking "I'm going to play it safe because I want to AT LEAST have a house in these countries in the case all the others are proven to become failed states..."

While others might say "I KNOW this chain represents the philosophy that guarantees value creation and the others will no doubt fail...so I'm selling all my property in those countries and buying a mansion in the country whose driving philosophy most believe in.  I will be very very wealthy in this kingdom when I'm proven correct."

In this way the earlier you invest in building the toolkit that changed the crypto world, the better off you are...as a reward for your vision. 

I want bitshares to someday have as many forks as bitcoin...why? Because it is superior technology to bitcoin and at the moment we have as many legitimate alt chains as bitcoin is the moment when DPOS as a foundational protocol is accepted by the broader world as the crypto gold standard.  The only differences would be slight changes in how consensus is reached (ie--will the roles of delegate, witness, worker...exist separately? Or will they remain combined? Will the dpos chain innovate in ensuring anonymity as a foundational philosophy? ...etc)

The more I think about it, the more I think we should create two separate chains and leave one with the name bts(2.0) and a second one to something else (like graphene)...then let everyone decide where they prefer to stay.  At that point it is THEIR decision...not BM's...so they can't complain about because it is their own free will and good decisions that are rewarded. 

It would also be a very newsworthy event that we enable EVERYONE to decide where they will participate...and will make many original bitcoin holders wonder why the heck they are constantly buying into new altcoins when they could just join the buy into any of the bitshares-powered iterations.







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Offline eagleeye

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This is the worst timing in the world, where is moonstone, and how can we start promoting indexes with this trauma.

Offline starspirit

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I'm not a lawyer, but it seems sensible on the surface that CNX would have a right to own and license the work it self-funds from this point on, just like any other business. What I'd like to see at some point in the future is for BitShares to be resilient enough so that our entire ecosystem is not functionally tied to any third party work or license arrangement, including CNX. I'd imagine we would need a much broader development community and a more modular (plug-and-play) approach to the protocol, all of which will require more growth. For now, I think it would make the community more comfortable in following the development team and CNX to know who CNX is exactly.

With regard to the scope of the license, what will be the treatment of protocol additions that are to be funded by BitShares? So for example, if third parties in our ecosystem designed new markets, and the community voted to contractually engage CNX to add this code to the protocol, would these "modules" be subject to CNX licensing terms? I'm not sure of the best answer here.

I find it a bit confusing that bitShares would be funding Cryptonomex's employees individually within the system - why not just a single payment to Cryptonomex that they can distribute as they see fit?

Why couldn't we have discussed internal  bitShares solutions to the issue of developer pay? For example, there may have been (and still may be) ways to use donor funds, or internally backed project ventures with profit-driven outcomes. Maybe this discussion was had, and no other viable options found for now, but it would be nice to open these ideas up.

Offline Ander

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klosure, the dev team has never intended to develop Bitshares for free, while they starve.  They have always planned to develop Bitshares for a reasonable salary so that they can survive while doing it.

Part 1 2013 - Nov 2014: AGS funding via bitcoin donations.  It was initially hoped that this would last as long as needed (until Bitshares grew big).  But instead of continuing to increase, Bitcoin crashed.

Part 2: Nov 2014 - May 2015: Paid delegates.  It was then hoped that for a couple percent inflaiton a year, Bitshares could support its own development through the paid delegate system.  However, the bitshares market cap dropped another 80%, and what could have been a workable wage became very small.

Part 3: June 2015 on: Cryptonomex.  The developers make money with their new software/consulting company to pay the bills.  While they do this, they also give all the software they make to Bitshares, to continue to develop it.



That was my understanding of this whole thing.
You and Newmine seem to have instead interpreted this as "they are trying to steal everything and screw us all". 

I will admit I'm not an expert in licenses, so it would be good to have a legal expert tell us whats up. 



If you don't like the idea of developers making any money while they develop a cryptocurrency, then maybe you should go join an altcoin community where devs work for free?  There are plenty of them out there.  However, most of them struggle.


The most promising projects in crypto space, such as Ripple, Bitshares, Stellar, and Ethereum, have found a way to have funding and thus pay developers.  (As far as I know).  Since the original Bitshares funding money ran out they have had to improvise and this is part of that improvisation.  The great thing about Cryptonomex, imo, is that it gets them funding without diluting BTS.
You are like Kurt Russell's character at the end of Vanilla Sky.

Sorry, I dont know that movie.

If I am simply naively mistaken due to lack of understanding of licenscing, and Newmine is actually our savior who will prevent the value of BTS from being stolen from us by evil developers, well, then I am sorry. :)

But I dont think that is the case, and I would like to see the community united and growing together, and not always being upset over everything. 
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Offline NewMine

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klosure, the dev team has never intended to develop Bitshares for free, while they starve.  They have always planned to develop Bitshares for a reasonable salary so that they can survive while doing it.

Part 1 2013 - Nov 2014: AGS funding via bitcoin donations.  It was initially hoped that this would last as long as needed (until Bitshares grew big).  But instead of continuing to increase, Bitcoin crashed.

Part 2: Nov 2014 - May 2015: Paid delegates.  It was then hoped that for a couple percent inflaiton a year, Bitshares could support its own development through the paid delegate system.  However, the bitshares market cap dropped another 80%, and what could have been a workable wage became very small.

Part 3: June 2015 on: Cryptonomex.  The developers make money with their new software/consulting company to pay the bills.  While they do this, they also give all the software they make to Bitshares, to continue to develop it.



That was my understanding of this whole thing.
You and Newmine seem to have instead interpreted this as "they are trying to steal everything and screw us all". 

I will admit I'm not an expert in licenses, so it would be good to have a legal expert tell us whats up. 



If you don't like the idea of developers making any money while they develop a cryptocurrency, then maybe you should go join an altcoin community where devs work for free?  There are plenty of them out there.  However, most of them struggle.


The most promising projects in crypto space, such as Ripple, Bitshares, Stellar, and Ethereum, have found a way to have funding and thus pay developers.  (As far as I know).  Since the original Bitshares funding money ran out they have had to improvise and this is part of that improvisation.  The great thing about Cryptonomex, imo, is that it gets them funding without diluting BTS.
You are like Kurt Russell's character at the end of Vanilla Sky.

Offline Helikopterben

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Both bitshares and ethereum have nearly run out of development money, the bitcoin foundation is effectively bankrupt, and we have seen an endless stream of exchange failures.  This bear market has been brutal on everyone, but the silver lining is that the weakest projects and scams have been weeded out for the most part.  Only the strongest survive.  Bear markets are necessary for that. 

As an investor in this space, I try to keep up with most of the projects in the top 10 on coinmarketcap, which is difficult at times considering how dynamic this space is.  IMO, bitshares has a really good chance of being one of the dominant chains coming out of this.  Bitshares and dash are the only two projects that have clear plans on how to pay devs indefinitely by revenue generated from the blockchain.  Ripple appears to have plenty of XRP in reserves and bitcoin has received the bulk of VC money, so they should be fine for a while.  Sidechains in bitcoin could be a game changer if they are able to create secure revenue-generating models. 

However, bitshares has the potential to become the first self-sustained blockchain thankfully now that the core devs have secured additional funding to make it through until the blockchain does start producing significant revenue.  I think fears about cmx being a conflict of interest are overblown just as fears of blockstream being a conflict of interest in bitcoin is overblown. 

As far as IP, core devs face a catch-22 situation with the code they write.  If they don't open source it, then nobody will trust it.  If they do open source it, then anyone else is free to copy and use it, and licensing and copywriting will largely be irrelevant in this space IMO.  Remember, these systems are global and decentralized in nature.  It will be very difficult for legacy IP laws to be enforced.  You can't sue a blockchain.  If someone from a different country decides to copy your code and put it into another blockchain and do it all anonymously, you are not going to stop them, no matter how many lawyers you employ.  What would truly be fascinating is if someone came up with a way to make code both open source and restrictive at the same time through code and/or cryptography, not through legacy IP laws.  I don't see how this would be possible, but I am continually amazed at the ingenuity that comes out of this space. 
« Last Edit: June 16, 2015, 12:09:43 am by Helikopterben »

Offline Ander

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klosure, the dev team has never intended to develop Bitshares for free, while they starve.  They have always planned to develop Bitshares for a reasonable salary so that they can survive while doing it.

Part 1 2013 - Nov 2014: AGS funding via bitcoin donations.  It was initially hoped that this would last as long as needed (until Bitshares grew big).  But instead of continuing to increase, Bitcoin crashed.

Part 2: Nov 2014 - May 2015: Paid delegates.  It was then hoped that for a couple percent inflaiton a year, Bitshares could support its own development through the paid delegate system.  However, the bitshares market cap dropped another 80%, and what could have been a workable wage became very small.

Part 3: June 2015 on: Cryptonomex.  The developers make money with their new software/consulting company to pay the bills.  While they do this, they also give all the software they make to Bitshares, to continue to develop it.



That was my understanding of this whole thing.
You and Newmine seem to have instead interpreted this as "they are trying to steal everything and screw us all". 

I will admit I'm not an expert in licenses, so it would be good to have a legal expert tell us whats up. 



If you don't like the idea of developers making any money while they develop a cryptocurrency, then maybe you should go join an altcoin community where devs work for free?  There are plenty of them out there.  However, most of them struggle.


The most promising projects in crypto space, such as Ripple, Bitshares, Stellar, and Ethereum, have found a way to have funding and thus pay developers.  (As far as I know).  Since the original Bitshares funding money ran out they have had to improvise and this is part of that improvisation.  The great thing about Cryptonomex, imo, is that it gets them funding without diluting BTS. 
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Offline klosure

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Sovereignty means "having supreme power of authority over a domain". How exactly would we (the holders of BTS) be losing our sovereignty when we have never had "sovereignty" over the BTS code to begin with?  BitShares code, up to this point, has always been public domain. Nobody has sovereignty over it, anyone can use it for any reason, that's the whole point of public domain.
Sovereignty isn't usually a concept used with code so it should be obvious that its usage was rhetorical and not meant to lead to ethimological debate. Using code which property rights we don't own and that we aren't allowed to license and reuse is very much akin to a loss of sovereignty as compared to the current situation where we can do as we see fit with the code base.

Cryptonomix gave us a choice: rather than using our current "inferior" but fully public domain software we could accept their gracious offering to give us a free license to the (still fully open-source) code that they have written over the last 4 months.
"choice" and "gracious" are not the words that come to mind first to describe what effectively amounts to an ultimatum.