…for the good of the IC, obviously. I do not read any compelling evidence that IC Devs is a “bad actor,” in this thread or elsewhere. What I see is that:
A) one project in their suit experimented with a license that you don’t like. They have made no effort to promote this license, beyond flatly declaring it a failure. Extrapolating this to say they have nefarious rent-seeking intentions is very off-base.
B) they’re too US-centric. Here, the same “this is the world computer” argument should apply just as much to IC Devs and its (perhaps) US audience as it does to any other organization.
If you have other red flags or reasons that you don’t believe me, please reach out. I sort of get your argument that we don’t have enough traction or funding yet to be “trusted” in the community yet, but I really don’t understand what I/We have done to gain your opinion that we are unbelievable.
When I re-raised the issue in Candy Library - Try 2 - Financing Software on the IC I did so specifically to make sure that any profits benefited the community, in the hope that I could bring more attention to the desired topic at hand, and to expose findings of the experiment for others to learn from. It would have been much easier to rug pull the people that invested time and effort into the original experiment and just to let it die on the vine. I did not do that.
The only outreach I had from anyone before the neuron proposal was from @borovan on the dev discord just after Christmas where I again expressed a desire to have a discussion and not to push “rent-seeking code”. Discord
A couple of days later I asked borovan if he wanted to engage in a public discussion about it and seek the best way to handle cycle sharing type code and he declined for his own valid reasons, but I also didn’t know that there was a broader set of folks with the same concerns. He can confirm with you that I expressed a commitment to installing a generic license in the base code on 1/3 before the neuron proposal went live in a private chat.
Since you’ve spoken up in this post I’ve addressed this topic with nothing but a consistent approach and clarified any issues that you’ve had concerns about.
It has become clear that some people are proactively reaching out to others in the community to imply that ICDevs.org can’t be trusted. Since we don’t know who these folks are it is hard to counteract this narrative at the scale you’ve seemed to have managed to spread this meme. I’m more than happy to discuss this with you and the others that have developed this opinion.
How about another proposal in a week - A proposal to include ICDevs as default follow-target neurons to the NNS. It just costs 1 ICP so should be fine I guess.
Maybe ICDevs will provide more clarity to any concerns you expressed. Then let’s discuss about proof of human and voting power distribution
Anyone can put forward a proposal that could remove the Neuron from the front-end if there is any threat to the Network.
I share the sentiment with you, but this will only drag everyone down. Many participants have put a lot of time and effort into this proposal, so it would be a shame to see it get wasted. I appreciate your responses, but It seems to me that you would rather create a lose-lose situation than let the ICDevs Neuron get to the front-end of NNS.
I hope you do respond to this ^ @villa-straylight, I’m curious what you think about this.
Alliances are inevitable, but there is room for everyone on the Internet Computer. As I said before, the growth and adoption will get delayed in the crossfire.
How do we define impure motives? The voting threshold for governance proposal is 3%, You have more than 8% of the total NNS Votes and voted against the proposal. For me, as a network participant, this is concerning regardless of which Neuron you rejected. What worries me is How it unfolded. What if the seed club decides to delete a Canister?
Can you google me (and other dev. advisors) again please?
EDIT:
I am happy that everyone makes their concerns know. I think we can all work with that.
But I would like to see some points on which ICDevs could improve, and not just ‘I do not trust them’. I would love to see an ICDevs-like organisation that tries to incentivise the creation of developer packages/tooling.
I don’t know if there is a language barrier here or what, but it seems that every time you put words in my mouth you are expressing the exact opposite of my opinion or intent.
I’m happy to let my contributions here and elsewhere for the IC ecosystem stand on their own.
As far as my book goes, it is literally about neutralizing economic rent and making sure that workers gain access to the full output of their labor. The entire point is to eliminate financial middlemen. If you are on the side of eliminating the ill effects of the collection of undue economic rent then I guarantee you that we are on the same side of that issue and have common goals. The spirit of the license was to create a system where developers could take middlemen out of the software creation processes. Does that turn software devs into the new middlemen? Possibly. The license was expressly open and forkable to neutralize that, but there are certainly even better solutions. We should discuss those and find a better solution.
Our board was selected for their experience outside the world of the IC in order to help us level set, prioritize, and serve a broad set of developer needs that devs aren’t always focused on. Four members have worked directly on or recruited developers for decentralized and IC targeted projects and one is an international lawyer, which we felt might be handy to have around. One built the initial smart contracts for Gitcoin Grants. Our executive advisor ran X-Prize and is currently spending most of his time working with Wyoming and other jurisdictions on their DAO infrastructure and enabling decentralized governance on a massive scale. The board knows their lack of expertise in specific IC-related things and has empowered our dev advisory board with most of the operational power in the organization. Organizations are welcome to set themselves up however they see fit, and we’ve chosen to seek oversight from those that need developers, recruit developers, represent developers, and can provide an external lens on the effectiveness of the organization to change things outside of our IC bubble.
ICDevs is certainly trying to recruit voting power on the IC. We believe that strong institutions are necessary for advancement and that an organization that represents developers and their interests is an important part of that ecosystem. We are committed to limiting that voting power to issues that have some impact on developers and the developer experience inside the ecosystem. Others we will leave to DFINITY and the ICA for now and elected neurons in the future.
We are very committed to making sure that developers are not taken advantage of in these new ecosystems and that the proper amount of value accrues to those that are going to build the IC systems of tomorrow. There are multiple pathways to that vision and we are not afraid to talk about any of them. Some structure has to be in place if you want developers to build for your platform. Maybe it is tokenization of platforms, maybe it is licenses, maybe it is quadratic funding of known public goods. If we can’t talk about these without being accusatory, derogatory, or straight up slanderous we don’t have much hope of finding an answer. Or I should rather say that the community here is going to do those things and have those conversations and if you continue to hide behind a veil and drum up clearly false narratives your opinion will likely be severely discounted.
If you have a solution as to how developers can be incentivized to write code that they release without any license or IP protections we are 100% all ears and will promote it from the mountain tops. If the community decides that cycle-based payment for software services is an anti-pattern we’ll gladly write it up and dissuade people from using those services. As of now all we can derive from your statements is that someone with a lot of power on the IC thinks that developers should contribute code without a license and without any means of collecting value for their contribution. I don’t think the devs that are going to build these platforms have any interest in being your serfs and we will certainly push back against that if that is your intent.
Hey villa, first of all thanks for coming out and making your point.
Secondly thanks for staying for the debate.
Thirdly thanks for the link, I have to admit “hyper-capitalism” gives me goosebumps even if you put “democratic” in front of it…
Besides that, I’m really happy how this went down, after all I’m here for the controversy. Imho that’s the way it should be.
I personally think the whole point of this default-follow-neuron issue is anyway just cosmetic at this point. A gesture to be perceived as more decentralized. Actually this was the first vote with this much individual engagement, that I’m aware of. So that’s the big win here, more and more individual engagement.
Not being displayed as default in the nns dapp, shouldn’t stop ICDevs from following their goal and keeping up the work they are doing. While I understand this might be a bummer, it shouldn’t make much of a difference, really.
I do think the name could be an issue for some, there are people working on this project for some years now that are all ICdevs but not part of this Texas non-profit.
We are the ones who will be voting on the direction of ICDevs’ resources according to the rules of ICDevs. The point is to give us power, collectively, to determine the direction of ICDevs.
I believe the intent behind updating the default followees was to provide stakeholders with a list of neurons that could be trusted to vote on all governance proposals. Mainly because Dfinity has decided to abstain from voting on them going forward.
I agree that not being on this list shouldn’t be perceived as being a major loss.
I understand that. But I don’t see how that proves intent to your potential followers. You’ve already been given extra VP for your commitment. Are you now suggesting that others should empower you even more for the same reason?
I think there are a lot of factors that could be at play. For example, how do I know you and your fellow seed investors don’t have large holdings in other major networks that you see as competing with the IC? Maybe you work somewhere like Ark Investment or Amun and you’re willing to vote against things that could hold the IC back long enough to profit off your other investments.
These are all hypotheticals but I don’t think that simply being a seed investor proves your intent.
I’m actually not salty about it at all. I pointed out the same thing in my previous comment.
I feel like the adversarial comments on this forum may be clouding everyone’s perception. I actually appreciate your willingness to speak up and even if I don’t fully agree with your position it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate your contributions to this discussion.
You made this statement a little while earlier:
This inspired my follow-up question:
This was followed up with your response about being a “seed bro” and then that’s why I addressed your response in the way I did.
I honestly don’t care about you being a seed investor. I just want to know why we should believe you have the IC’s best intent in mind after making a statement about having shadowy figures in the background.
The other groups have disclosed who their members are. They’ve also posted articles explaining their position and were willing to answer questions on this forum about their intent. I believe It’s this transparency that allowed you to make an informed decision about ICDevs. I just hope that your organization would offer a similar level of transparency.
emmm… no. While I would like icdevs to be default followees, there is no obligation for “seed bros” to be transparent. There is nothing that they are asking of the community that is not currently in their power. Why should they need to be “transparent” ?
I’m not talking about all “seed bros”. I’m not asking for every seed investor to declare who they are. @villa-straylight said he was considering forming an organization
Transparency about this organization is what I’m hoping for.
This is also false. Jenny, David, and Kevin spent significant chunks of 2018-2020 working for or contracting with an organization that invested $20M in Dfinity in 2018 and spent the next few years dedicated to selling the vision of the IC to Fortune 500 companies while waiting for launch. Kevin specifically spent significant time with Dfinity engineers doing product discovery. While IC technicals were sparse at that point we were in very close contact with Dom and the dfinity team working to form enterprise strategies and collecting requirements.
Taylor spent time trying to recruit blockchain engineers for this same organization.
I agree. It was recast democratic hypercatallaxy after visiting with a number of folks about the concept. It means something along the lines of “making an enemy a friend.” Hopefully we can get to that spirit here as well.
Why the saltiness about us having a lot of ICP, staking it, getting voting power. This is like the 4th time somebody’s focused on that being negative in some way. @skilesare for example
I’m not salty that you have a bunch of ICP, I just wish I did so that I didn’t have to worry so much about how to provide for my family. Financial independence is wonderful! And 8 year staked neurons are even better. Until I’m able to procure my own I aim to think deeply about how to recruit thousands of devs to the platform that also don’t have financial independence but want it.
Something about this bothered me when I first read it, and now, reading a Twitter thread that had the same quote, I understand what. Please correct me if I am wrong, but the quote implies that Developer Advisory Board seats are on sale. Is it true that a relatively small donation could ‘procure’ a majority on the advisory board of ICDevs, which in turn would determine its agenda? Again, apologies if I misunderstood.
I do not read any compelling evidence that IC Devs is a “bad actor,” in this thread or elsewhere. What I see is that:
