License for JoinMarket

[chris-belcher]

JoinMarket doesn't have a license at the moment. I generally intended it to be an open-source public-good kind of product. I'd like it to be used by everybody in bitcoinland who needs it.

P2pool uses GPL3, we could just go with that.

[adlai]

AGPL

There was also an IRC discussion about using P2CH to have all participants sign agreements not to violate each other's inviolable rights. Does anybody have logs handy?

[yhaenggi]

i'd also like to see AGPL

[adlai]

2015-11-21 21:42:57   adlai   proslogion: <gmaxwell> "You should 
probably put some terms of service on every joinmaket connection,
where the parties agree to not attack. While unlikely to happen, 
I think it would be halarious to fund joinmaket by suing a       
blockchain analysis company that was performing DOS attacks to   
deanonymize users."                                              

[chris-belcher]

AGPL would mean it probably couldn't be used in localbitcoins, bitbargain or another server-side bitcoin institution, if I've understood it right. I'd be against that because I'd like them to use joinmarket without being compelled to share their trade secrets by open sourcing their backend.

gmaxwell's idea is excellent.

[adlai]

We may be able to specify that the Affero clauses only apply to the provided scripts, and leave the joinmarket/ libraries as regular GPLv3... :IANAL:

gmaxwell's idea is also good for enforcing "social contracts" about how much tracking participants are allowed to do on each other: for example, makers could require that takers acknowledge that their encryption UTXO is logged, and takers could require that makers agree that their input coin-densities be compared against those of other makers.

[katlogic]

Is there a particular reason to go with GPL? Think of the poor tivoization companies (21 inc et al). It might be counter productive to bar them entry because of silly politics in the particular case of coinjoin - as they could bring massive anonymity set which seems to be desired above all in this project, on which the rest can comfortably piggyback. Just my quiet, contrarian voice wishing for MIT or BSD like.

[chris-belcher]

@katlogic I only suggested GPL because some projects like p2pool use it, I don't actually know much about the topic. Could you explain a bit more how GPL would stop 21 and others using it? From what I read briefly on the wikipedia page for tivoization, the companies could still use GPL'd software.

[AdamISZ]

As I understood it, MIT allows for-profit entities to build closed source using the open-source MIT code if they wish, whereas GPL does not. But, I think there are a lot of subtleties around this. e.g. googling found this discussion.

I must admit I have never liked the whole licensing question (I find "intellectual property" a detestable concept, even though I know it is very hard to ignore it), but I wouldn't lose any sleep if we chose MIT and let people use it under any licensing model they like (although it doesn't seem very likely to be honest; the protocol is more likely to be reused than the code).

[abitfan]

MIT or bsd 2-clause - its free for all