-
@ Anthony Accioly
2025-05-03 18:37:58
Hey, sorry for not replying earlier. Somehow I didn’t get a notification.
I’m 100% with you. My licensing concerns aren’t about imposing "freedom" on users (FSF or US-style, like every time a country has a natural resource they need 🤣), regardless of my ragebait “communism” language above. It’s about safeguarding the open nature of Nostr against patent litigation.
The more I get to know the Nostr ecosystem, the more patent litigation concerns me. Other than the NIP repo, nostr:nprofile1qqsrhuxx8l9ex335q7he0f09aej04zpazpl0ne2cgukyawd24mayt8gprfmhxue69uhkcmmrdd3x77pwve5kzar2v9nzucm0d5hszxnhwden5te0wpuhyctdd9jzuenfv96x5ctx9e3k7mf0qydhwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnhv4ehgetjde38gcewvdhk6tc4rdlnm maintains a bunch of libraries used by almost every dev. Other devs also maintain quite popular libraries.
The good news is, as much as we all like to complain about Nostr and its jankiness, a lot of what’s in Nostr consists of novel / patentable ideas, and folks have been sharing and acting with integrity around their IP. Nostr has been the first Bazaar-like project that’s caught my eye in a long time.
The bad news is... the whole scene is set for patent litigation. We have a bunch of smart, young, idealistic people, and a lot of funding coming from, well, folks who aren’t that young or idealistic anymore. Young and idealistic people can be unpredictable, especially when dealt a bad hand, or when their "authority", sense of "control" or hopes of “making it big” are shattered.
Companies, on the other hand, are mostly predictable... If they can find a way to make money, they will.
There’s a reason why the FSF and Apache add all the legalese to their licences and keep specialised lawyers on their payroll. They’ve been through the kind of legal trouble that, as far as I know, Nostr has avoided so far, but likely won’t be able to avoid forever.
I’m 100% with you on how I license my own OSS stuff (Haven is an exception, as utxo had already licensed it under MIT lke most things on Nostr, when I started contributing. I just added the license to thr repo). *GPL works very well to protect the community. The Apache Licence is a great alternative for folks who don’t want to impose viral OSS clauses on forks. It doesn’t add much burden beyond conserving the original NOTICE file and copyright statements. It can also be used in proprietary/closed-source forks without issue, while doing a tremendous job of protecting the project and its community from corporate greed and former contributors going rogue.
This is the direction I’d like core Nostr projects to take. Extra points if the project also enforces a Contributor Licence Agreement or Developer Certificate of Origin. This might all sound unnecessary or annoying in 2025, but it can be enforced automatically in the CI/CD pipeline, and would make the Nostr ecosystem much more resilient.