please stop the attempt to slowly erode trust in Dfinity and the ICA. We know who you are, we understand what resources you have. Ain’t gonna work.
Don’t make me call out names.
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So you’ll be worried only once it is too late? Sounds like a plan.
Dfinity can do both, infact decentralizing Dfinity should be way easier than decentralizing the network and would greatly benefit the IC as much as any technical feat.
None of this really matters if ultimately the IC is owned and controlled by Dfinity, which in turn is controlled by Dom, some parts of the code are patented and can’t be forked so if Dfinity acts against the network’s best interest there is nothing we can do with the code without changing parts of it.
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Hahahaha! I’d love to frame this, with your avatar as chef’s kiss. Please, please pleaase call out names. Thanks for bringing a bit of comedic joy to my day. Even a bit ill, it made me laugh out loud.
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I would worry about internal fudders more than decentralization that is in progress already. We have just recovered from external attack and the last thing we need is internal fudders using their impatience to try implode us from within.
There is a difference between FUD and constructive criticism, unfortunately in crypto the 2 seem to be confused. Personally I fear blind faith and fanboysm more than any fudder.
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I think this may be a misunderstanding. Taking @free at his word, and I do, these parts of code are patented, but they can be forked. I really like this aspect of the IC licensing and give full credit to Dfinity and to Dom. The license for these parts merely forces whoever uses the pantented code to make their own code more permissively licensed, in effect full open source. If what @free described is the case, the code is fully forkable, useable and modifiable.
The concern you raised about what happens if it doesn’t get forked in the eventuality Dfinity went down or took the code private is legitimate. But it ceases to be an issue the moment there is even one full, public fork. So if you forked it tomorrow, the issue would vanish. Would be worth verifying, but it sounds right to me from inspecting the licenses.
Since I trust DFinity, I prefer they ease out slowly and not decentralize abruptly. FTX impact would have been worse if they did. Maybe now they can sort of accelerate it, but keep the deterministic decentralization going at the right pace. I am okay with the pace, the enemies are still lurking (within and without).
@diegop I think some very important points have been made here.
The ICA could be a fantastic addition to decentralising the IC - whats going on with it currently?
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Afaik there are already existing licenses to achieve the same thing, some variation of GPL maybe?
@free specified:
My understanding of the license under which the code is released is that you are free to modify it in any way as long as it ends up part of the IC. The patents and whatnot only prevent you from taking the code and launching a competing network or service.
An hypothetical IC fork following some drama caused by Dfinity would be considered as “not part of the IC” and a competing network. This is speculation tho I’m not a lawyer or expert in code licesing so it would be nice to have an official statement from Dfinity on what the license actually entails and which components are affected by it.
I don’t think @free’s shorthand quite describes it. You can read the licenses here:
There is no requirement for the code to be part of the IC, just that the code is fully open source, meaning it can’t be adopted into proprietary code.
Going from
These and Apache are the only licenses.
If as @free says these licenses account for ALL the public code, and all public code is enough for a complete clone of the current IC, then the entire IC can, and should, be cloned. I haven’t verified that this is in fact the case, but for now I am happy to trust @free. At some point, if I return to Dfinity dialogues after I’m back at work, I might try to verify it. Be a good thing for someone to do, anyway.
What about this caveat?
Platform Limitation - The licenses granted in sections 2(A) and 2(B) extend only to the software or derivative works that you create that run directly on the Internet Computer platform.
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I love that caveate. Fudders need to go develop another blockchain from scratch or move on to another project if they think this one is not good.
Good spot, don’t know howi missed that. And you are absolutely right dang it. There is simply no escaping the entire IC depending on Dom Williams. I had truly thought at least technologically, there was a path. And there still might be, as is, but with a serious risk of litigation.
If Dfinity suddenly closed shop or went private, if as @free suggests the community could keep the IC running with a public fork, it could be argued that it is still the IC, so the terms of the license hold. But it could also notionally be argued that, as a fork, it’s not the same. Certainly a lawsuit to settle the matter does not seem beyond imagination.
So even technically, given Dfinity is the host of all the canonical codebase, a post-Dfinity future would not be assured by the current licensing terms, without greater clarity on what the Internet Computer is, legally, and who therefore legally owns it.
The ideal scenario would be something like a real ICA, so that a genuinely independent, community accountable, membership association, owns and hosts the code, infrastructure and everything needed to keep running (and indeed define) the IC, and Dfinity is and continues to be a major, probably THE major contributor, but not the owner of the project. This means the IC does not entirely rest on one person’s shoulders.
As it stands, if Dom and token Swiss lawyer vanished, were incapacitated, or abruptly ineligible to be on Swiss foundation boards, it is unclear to me what would happen to the entire governance structure. How would you even appoint a successor? And with no successors, what is the legal status of the ICP, ICA, and the IC itself? Woud Dfinity need to be dissolved? Where would the funds go? Would the “small group of professionals” carry on voting on behalf of Dfinity and ICA?
It is uncommon, but not truly rare for an organisation to lose two board members to any of a myriad circumstances. If that’s all the members you have, and one is a token Swiss lawyer, I genuinely don’t know what the legal procedure is in Switzerland for settling succession and asset disposal.
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I actually agree with you here. I think this is a wise licensing provision in general. I would not change it, myself. The problem is that it currently rests on top of a pin.
What if you think this project is great, you want to keep building on it, and because 2 people were removed suddenly and unexpectedly from the board, you no longer can, because Dfinity and the ICA can no longer fulfill the requirements of having a foundation board, and Dfinity can no longer function and must be dissolved? Or you love everything about the project now, but Dom Williams is out of the board and so is his token Swiss lawyer, and now you have some form of government appointed Administrator deciding what happens next, without any connection to the IC?
I know you have a lot of faith, but wouldn’t you at least want to be assured that the IC would survive without Dom? Or is it FUD to want it to, and for a true believer if Dom goes, everything he built and everyone who built it should go too?
I would keep this clause in the license, but I would make sure that the IC can be considered to exist even if Dfinity ceases. At the moment, given Dfinity is the holder of everything, and Dom is the sole holder of Dfinity, the IC you love, exactly as it is now without any changes, is pretty vulnerable.
I would encourage such genuine and deep and unconditional supporters of the IC to look beyond the instinct to defend Dom or Dfinity at defending the IC, not against Dom and Dfinity, but with Dom and Dfinity.
I can honestly say I have nothing personal against Dom, I don’t know him from Adam. Much of what I have gathered whenever I’ve looked does not inspire trust, or confidence in me, but I remain open to standing corrected and see the possibility that all the cognitive dissonance has an explanation (if only ANYONE would explain!).
I not only have nothing against Dfinity: I hold it in high regard, admire the work of the team and have enjoyed almost all of their posts and interactions.
I would like nothing more than for Dom and Dfinity to succeed in the dream that brought me here in the first place. It is a beautiful design concept, and I want it to achieve its promise.
The simple, simple point which I’m astonished is controversial, is that I have due diligence issues around the prospect of that success being put in such a fragile place by institutional structures and opacity that depend in their entirely on one man, issues that would be very easy to fix, if the will was there. Certainly a much, much simpler design problem than the IC itself.
Is this really FUD? Can you really not tell when someone is fighting on the same side as you, because they are saying the logistics need to improve or we might be on track to fail? Is open eyed frienship not better than blind one? Is design for contingencies not better than design for a happy path only?
Designing for the unhappy path is not FUD, it’s designing for success. And you can’t do so, if naming the unhappy path is seen as FUD, conspiracy, or an attack on the system. It is the exact opposite: it’s how attacks on the system fail, and the system succeeds.
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So much speculation/interpretation in every side could be quickly cleared with a leadership intervention. This would soothe investors and devs following this forum post.
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Amen to that ildefons!
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Speaking of standing corrected, I stand corrected.
I doubted the existence of a General Assembly for the ICA, but have seen the full statutes now and confirmed that a General Assembly is required by law.
The full, official docs are here: Recherche d'entreprises dans le registre du commerce de Genève | ge.ch
Search for Internet Computer Association.
The General Assembly consists of… Dom and his token lawyer.
How could that assembly grow? By adding members. To join as a member you need to apply to the board (steering group) which is made up… of Dom (and his token lawyer).
So a hermetically closed circle. As long as Dom wants sole control, Dom has it, and I suspect the General Assembly will agree with Dom.
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Edit 1: deleted incorrect info of Boschler finance’s market cap after correction by @free. Thanks!
Edits 2-4: removed speculative statements about being a crypto whale, since I have no idea of the size of Bochsler finance’s fund.
Ok, I was sort of skeptical about the whole Dom and his lawyer bit - but its definitely two people.
Clicking on the link provided in the quote above and searching on “Internet Computer Association” led me to the below screenshot, which shows the two members of the Internet Computer Association.
Who’s this Gian Bochsler guy?
- He’s the head of https://bochslerfinance.com/, which according to their about page is a “Swiss-based asset manager specializing in the blockchain industry”
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He co-founded https://bity.com/
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He’s also board member and a co-founder of the Origyn Foundation
" As a founding partner of the ORIGYN Foundation, Gian specializes in the organization’s governance model, as well as its node and token structure." Source
@Leamsi He doesn’t sound like a lawyer to me - he’s a entrepreneur and Swiss fund manager with specific investments in the crypto space.
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Hey @justmythoughts, this is why It’s SO much better when the community inquires together, than when just one of us checks it out in between jobs and congested chests! You are absolutely right and I’m absolutely wrong. “And his token Swiss lawyer” has such a good ring too. But nope, I now don’t remember where I got the Swiss lawyer thing, or if I misremembered my own early posts. It does show that if I am an agent of some nefarious agents with huge resources, my masters aren’t getting their money’s worth, and my full time smear job is a poor ROI!