BitShares Forum
Other => Graveyard => BitShares PTS => Topic started by: earthbound on January 13, 2014, 09:37:15 pm
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I've gone back and forth about this, and I feel I must say this.
All of the code which dga used in his development (of a GPU-enabled ProtoShares miner) is either copyleft or open, with the only exception being his original code itself, which simply claims his copyright. However, the expected terms of use of dga's code have been very clearly expressed in the forum. bytemaster paid a very substantial ProtoShares bounty (1,000!) to dga with the express hope that it would lead to open development of a GPU-enabled ProtoShares miner. dga has himself also expressed his wish for others to openly develop modifications to his work. I do not speak for bytemaster or dga, but I will comment on the nature of their comments: their expressions form a very clear verbal license which states that if you produce derived works from dga's source code, you must make the sources for your derived works available.
It is therefore only right that you should make your sources available, or else stop distributing the resultant binaries. Although my modifications to dga's work are only in a development stage, I have made those source modifications publicly available. But I am the only programmer who has released my modified sources.
Programmers: you should either make your modified sources (from dga's work) available, or else stop distributing the resultant binaries.
Your better option is to release your sources, since it was the expectation to begin with that you do so. Moreover, the community will gladly continue to donate to you from their mining proceeds.
Community: if you have not been liberally sharing some of your proceeds to these programmers, please reconsider. They deserve compensation for their hard work.
Aside: I earlier posted a philosophical rant arguing for Invictus to release their sources to the Public Domain. But now I see how sadly necessary express copyleft can be :(
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I've gone back and forth about this, and I feel I must say this.
All of the code which dga used in his development (of a GPU-enabled ProtoShares miner) is either copyleft or open, with the only exception being his original code itself, which simply claims his copyright. However, the expected terms of use of dga's code have been very clearly expressed in the forum. bytemaster paid a very substantial ProtoShares bounty (1,000!) to dga with the express hope that it would lead to open development of a GPU-enabled ProtoShares miner. dga has himself also expressed his wish for others to openly develop modifications to his work. I do not speak for bytemaster or dga, but I will comment on the nature of their comments: their expressions form a very clear verbal license which states that if you produce derived works from dga's source code, you must make the sources for your derived works available.
It is therefore only right that you should make your sources available, or else stop distributing the resultant binaries. Although my modifications to dga's work are only in a development stage, I have made those source modifications publicly available. But I am the only programmer who has released my modified sources.
Programmers: you should either make your modified sources (from dga's work) available, or else stop distributing the resultant binaries.
Your better option is to release your sources, since it was the expectation to begin with that you do so. Moreover, the community will gladly continue to donate to you from their mining proceeds.
Community: if you have not been liberally sharing some of your proceeds to these programmers, please reconsider. They deserve compensation for their hard work.
Aside: I earlier posted a philosophical rant arguing for Invictus to release their sources to the Public Domain. But now I see how sadly necessary express copyleft can be :(
As a clarification: The unique bits that I developed in gpuhash.h and gpuhash.cu are Apache2 licensed, as specified in the LICENSE file of cudapts, but the modifications I made to the hasher surrounding it are covered under the original license of ptsminer.
Substantial parts of the ptsminer code and others are derived from the original Bitcoin code and seem to carry that copyright, which is under an MIT/Apache-like freely reusable license. It's a little bit difficult to track back, but to the best of my knowledge, I believe this is the case.
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My personal opinion on copyright is that it is invalid and may only be enforced on those who attempt to claim their own copyrights. Any party releasing binaries that do not follow the license that comes with the code have, in my opinion, given up all copyright in anything they do as demonstrated by their actions.
DGA has received his payment and as such has not been harmed by these actions.
Because copyright is invalid, I cannot blame them for their actions unless they are shown to be hypocritical. That said, I would consider everyone who uses these binaries and believes in copyright to also be hypocritical.
I also believe that the free market solution to resolving these kinds of disputes is to simply refuse to do business with these individuals if they are found to be hypocritical in this manner.
The other solution is to undercut them, copy their binaries and modify the payment address inside the binary to be the ANGEL address, provide a proxy that intercepts their packets and rewrites the payment address, or some other solution that destroys their market advantage. Remember, they have no copyright and by doing so you are not stealing anything from them.
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My personal opinion on copyright is that it is invalid and may only be enforced on those who attempt to claim their own copyrights. Any party releasing binaries that do not follow the license that comes with the code have, in my opinion, given up all copyright in anything they do as demonstrated by their actions.
DGA has received his payment and as such has not been harmed by these actions.
Because copyright is invalid, I cannot blame them for their actions unless they are shown to be hypocritical. That said, I would consider everyone who uses these binaries and believes in copyright to also be hypocritical.
I also believe that the free market solution to resolving these kinds of disputes is to simply refuse to do business with these individuals if they are found to be hypocritical in this manner.
The other solution is to undercut them, copy their binaries and modify the payment address inside the binary to be the ANGEL address, provide a proxy that intercepts their packets and rewrites the payment address, or some other solution that destroys their market advantage. Remember, they have no copyright and by doing so you are not stealing anything from them.
Bytemaster, I have to totally disagree. This discussion is not about copyright and credits. It's about copyleft.
And I have to agree in all points with the thread starter. These licenses are not enforcing copyright and restricting the usage and distribution, in opposite, they encourage to do so as long as you respect the terms and conditions which include to release all work based on the code under same open source standards as defined in the license.
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My personal opinion on copyright is that it is invalid and may only be enforced on those who attempt to claim their own copyrights. Any party releasing binaries that do not follow the license that comes with the code have, in my opinion, given up all copyright in anything they do as demonstrated by their actions.
DGA has received his payment and as such has not been harmed by these actions.
Because copyright is invalid, I cannot blame them for their actions unless they are shown to be hypocritical. That said, I would consider everyone who uses these binaries and believes in copyright to also be hypocritical.
I also believe that the free market solution to resolving these kinds of disputes is to simply refuse to do business with these individuals if they are found to be hypocritical in this manner.
The other solution is to undercut them, copy their binaries and modify the payment address inside the binary to be the ANGEL address, provide a proxy that intercepts their packets and rewrites the payment address, or some other solution that destroys their market advantage. Remember, they have no copyright and by doing so you are not stealing anything from them.
Bytemaster, I have to totally disagree. This discussion is not about copyright and credits. It's about copyleft.
And I have to agree in all points with the thread starter. These licenses are not enforcing copyright and restricting the usage and distribution, in opposite, they encourage to do so as long as you respect the terms and conditions which include to release all work based on the code under same open source standards as defined in the license.
Speaking as one of said authors, I think there are really two issues: What the licenses say, and what the community wants.
I released my code under a license that permits redistribution and reuse in binary form without providing the source. The Bitcoin source is similar. There are some restrictions -- namely, that the license file be included -- but, honestly, little violations of that are the least of anyone's concern.
In other words, in my read of it, what the binary releasers are doing is entirely within both the letter and the spirit of the licenses that I and the other developers chose.
But I'll admit that I was naive in choosing that license. :-) It feels a little funny to see people taking my code, repackaging it, and doing what is effectively selling it. But as Bytemaster points out, I was paid for it, and I had the option of taking other approaches. I think that were I to do it again, I would have selected a GPL-style copyright to require source redistribution to provide continued benefits to the community source code. But I often choose to release my code under Apache knowing that such reuse is a possibility. As an academic, I typically want my code to have impact, whether or not it's binary or open.
Then there's the question of the community and expectations, and here I'm completely with you: I'd strongly encourage people to vote with their feet and pick the open source options over the closed builds, for a variety of reasons -- not the least of which is trust!
This addresses only the question of my own copyright (and the inherited copyright from ptsminer, which draws from protoshares, and back to bitcoin). The question of Earthbound's copyright on his windows-related modifications is entirely separate, and if he didn't release his code under a permissive license, then the binary builds are, in fact, in violation. IANAL, of course, but I think that the real answer is not to get legal about it but for people to make the right votes with their feet.
Of course, that raises the question: How do you give people enough information to do that voting in an informed way? Sounds like some marketing to be done, of which this thread may be the start.
-Dave
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My personal opinion on copyright is that it is invalid and may only be enforced on those who attempt to claim their own copyrights. Any party releasing binaries that do not follow the license that comes with the code have, in my opinion, given up all copyright in anything they do as demonstrated by their actions.
DGA has received his payment and as such has not been harmed by these actions.
Because copyright is invalid, I cannot blame them for their actions unless they are shown to be hypocritical. That said, I would consider everyone who uses these binaries and believes in copyright to also be hypocritical.
I also believe that the free market solution to resolving these kinds of disputes is to simply refuse to do business with these individuals if they are found to be hypocritical in this manner.
The other solution is to undercut them, copy their binaries and modify the payment address inside the binary to be the ANGEL address, provide a proxy that intercepts their packets and rewrites the payment address, or some other solution that destroys their market advantage. Remember, they have no copyright and by doing so you are not stealing anything from them.
Bytemaster, I have to totally disagree. This discussion is not about copyright and credits. It's about copyleft.
And I have to agree in all points with the thread starter. These licenses are not enforcing copyright and restricting the usage and distribution, in opposite, they encourage to do so as long as you respect the terms and conditions which include to release all work based on the code under same open source standards as defined in the license.
Copy left is only something you can enforce if you own the COPY RIGHT to begin with.
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While we can't police copyright I think it is reasonable for the mod team to actively discourage people from using closed-source software for mining just as a best practice.
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Well if its against the ToS, then the PTS team must say so. Otherwise its not..
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Ahhhh . . . crickets are wonderful creatures, LOL :)
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I've gone back and forth about this, and I feel I must say this.
All of the code which dga used in his development (of a GPU-enabled ProtoShares miner) is either copyleft or open, with the only exception being his original code itself, which simply claims his copyright. However, the expected terms of use of dga's code have been very clearly expressed in the forum. bytemaster paid a very substantial ProtoShares bounty (1,000!) to dga with the express hope that it would lead to open development of a GPU-enabled ProtoShares miner. dga has himself also expressed his wish for others to openly develop modifications to his work. I do not speak for bytemaster or dga, but I will comment on the nature of their comments: their expressions form a very clear verbal license which states that if you produce derived works from dga's source code, you must make the sources for your derived works available.
It is therefore only right that you should make your sources available, or else stop distributing the resultant binaries. Although my modifications to dga's work are only in a development stage, I have made those source modifications publicly available. But I am the only programmer who has released my modified sources.
Programmers: you should either make your modified sources (from dga's work) available, or else stop distributing the resultant binaries.
Your better option is to release your sources, since it was the expectation to begin with that you do so. Moreover, the community will gladly continue to donate to you from their mining proceeds.
Community: if you have not been liberally sharing some of your proceeds to these programmers, please reconsider. They deserve compensation for their hard work.
Aside: I earlier posted a philosophical rant arguing for Invictus to release their sources to the Public Domain. But now I see how sadly necessary express copyleft can be :(
:D :D :D :D
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:D :D :D :D
LOL!
I'm glad you spotted this, barwizi--and I had meant to link here from yon referenced rant (and the disquiet which ensued (I gathered) therefrom), which I will now do.
For the curious, that's there: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1708.msg26428#msg26428 (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=1708.msg26428#msg26428)