📜 Software Licensing: Our Opportunity to Obviate Inequalities

[JFWooten4]

As communicated, the licenses we use are crucial to our work. In a world racing towards radical efficiency, this decision can very well determine the success of our movement. There is a lot of context behind any choice, so let's explore the plain-English nuances together!

1. Ecosystem Participation

Yes, I'll be the first to admit that many apes might not be uber-experts at GitHub. For a lot of us, the most we've used this platform is to download some open-source programs. But that's just half the equation—it's like watching a video on YouTube.

When I first joined GitHub, I thought it was just a cool place to host my code for free. The user interface was understandable, sleek, and friendly.¹ Since then, I've learned that it's so much more.² That's what I hope to share by the end of this post, which itself only exists because of these innovative tools. 🛠

We can sit back and wait for someone else to fix these problems (looking to you Gary). That's the pure consumerism choice, and it requires the least effort.³ Or we can take the market by the horns and start building our own solutions right here and now. 📈

1.1 Your Opportunity

Firstly, you can set up an account in just a few clicks. This lets you interact with anything we make! 🤝 It really is that simple.

I'll leave the continuing specifics up to a more adaptable DAO Docs page. Once this is up and running, we can link it to dao.whydrs.org for example. In the meantime, you can comment on this post using your new account.

Your profile is more than just some coding tool—it's an avenue to forge our future market. In web3, we can imagine, design, and deploy our own solutions to the world's problems with little more than a few online searches, AI prompts, and collaborative investigations.⁴ That's the power in our hands as we continue our fledgling journey into development.

1.2 Coordinating Labor

This platform lets us inherently centralize community work into a cohesive end product. By using it from day one, we can deploy truly world-changing products that inspire the next social movements. To illustrate this great power, I'll consider the example of open-source peer-to-peer electronic cash.

Initially, the development of Bitcoin clients was diverse, with several independent versions coexisting. This multiplicity was true to the decentralized ethos of Bitcoin. 🌐 Over time, however, Bitcoin Core emerged as the dominant client.

Single-repository development leads to efficiencies, unification, and coordinated complex problem-solving. 💡 This environment enables developers to collaborate effectively, securing the network against various threats and ensuring robustness. 🔒 However, this centralization also means that a smaller group of developers gains significant influence over the direction and future updates of the network.

1.3 Transparent Work

As much of our community has struggled with censorship, this concentration of power seems particularly relevant.⁵ It can lead to scenarios where decisions, whether about technical updates or philosophical directions, are controlled by a few. 🤔 Namely, while open to contributions, the final decisions often rest with a core group of maintainers who manage the Git repository.

While this can still happen in our Lemmy, the process is crucially subject to public oversight. Incredibly, GitHub has an extended implementation of this feature whereby anyone with write access to the repository can hide, redact, or expunge disruptive comments.⁶ ✏ And of course you can always reference rejected issues or pull requests. ✖

All this to say, I believe we can live with the centralization of member-maintainers since any changes they make are simple to audit, undo, and question. 🔍 Ultimately, our movement is rooted in decentralizing power from a few Wall Street monopolies imo. 🏛 Accordingly, we can maintain a continuous work product while distributing actual code review.⁷

2. Licensing Implications

We're getting there—promise. 👍 But first, we need to talk about a crucial decision that we must make now. I'll single out @tehchives as an example for prominence, but the question applies to each and every one of us.

Recently, @BibicJr and Chives had an incredible opportunity to chat with leading Tesla community members on the importance of DRS, thanks to stellar outreach by @my7ho5. 🤝 As you might know, Chives is a leading contributor to the organization (his humble words). Despite his massive engagement, commitment, and consideration for years now, Chives still needs a traditional job to stay alive, rent housing, and buy food.

As is common, Chives was handling work messages out of necessity during this meeting. When I asked him about it, he wrote, "It's hard to swing taking much time away from my work, logistically, unfortunately." More to the point, he retorted that, "all of our contributors are doing it as volunteers and as such all of those contributions need to be weighed against their working lives and a necessity for income." 💭

2.1 Sustainability

I think this is perfectly fine for someone that makes a few minor data contributions, advocacy posts, or code reviews.⁸ But for such an integral participant in our effort to field calls from his day job while working on our nonprofit—I just don't think it's right. That's why the licensing choices we make matter so much.

In fact, Chives is actually paying me to work on TAD3, the blockchain DRS.⁹ In his own words, this is since he's, "in a pretty unique situation where I'm able to spend a lot of time on project efforts while still meeting the expectations of my employer." This is an innovative, empowering, and remarkable position from my perspective, as someone living off his savings that's spoken to other community members who've tried the same and run out of cash.

Namely, I remember trying to balance running a family fund with 23-credit-hour semesters at Georgia Tech. As someone deeply obsessed with markets, it infuriated me when my split attention cost me a simple trade. Eventually, it got so stressful that I started running away from my responsibilities at a most crucial time.

2.2 Specialization

Capitalism works because each of us can work on that one thing we truly know best. For some of our community like @JamesAlfonse, it's deploying incredible distributed databases. For others, it's (at least partially) condensing nuanced research into memes:

I'm writing this in a voice channel where Bob and Pickle are going back and forth on specific flooring construction materials. If you start tiling, then they know everything there is about grout, thinset, or trowel—from experience. 🧱 Coincidentally, the founder of Laylor Corporation also got her start in masonry.

This kind of real-world work easily demands compensation from society. It's why someone can start washing your car windshield at a stoplight, flash a smile, and expect a few bucks. I believe people are naturally wired to reward the effortful goods and services of others, but software seems different.

2.3 Attribution

"Raising money isn’t easy, whether you’re an open source project, a nonprofit, or a software startup, and in most cases requires you to get creative. Identifying how you want to get paid, doing your research, and putting yourself in your funder’s shoes will help you build a convincing case for funding."

"Free, publicly available source code is the infrastructure on which all of digital society relies. It is vital to the functioning of governments, private companies, and individual lives. However, few realize that public code is built and maintained almost exclusively by unpaid volunteers, and the enormous amount of work required is in desperate need of institutional support."

"Our modern society—everything from hospitals to stock markets to newspapers to social media—runs on software. But take a closer look, and you’ll find that the tools we use to build software are buckling under demand."

— @nayafia

A large amount of today's leading innovative work comes from open-source projects like Bitcoin. But for the 99% of work that isn't a cryptocurrency, there are quite limited compensation mechanisms. This is problematic if we agree that the most efficient computer systems are entirely open-source.

While the socioeconomic challenges here are mammoth, I wholeheartedly believe we have a unique opportunity to tackle the beast head-on. What's at stake is more than incentivizing innovation; it's about empowering the creative developers of the world to focus entirely on their craft. And if Chives wants a proper microphone, these systems should let him get one, too!

Building in the open is about more than just technical code. It's part of the ongoing struggle to compensate intellectually-stimulating work that's returned to all of society, not the 1%. This setup brings a responsibility to remain transparent and inclusive, ensuring that the community's diverse views are considered in the development process.

3. Same Team

Imo the best part of this community is that you don't have to constantly convince who you're talking to that monolithic SIMFUs are doing horrible things behind closed doors. It just doesn't make sense that you need 118% collateral when buying stock. The only reason they've been able to keep this under wraps for so long is that it's impossible to actually audit Wall Street's proprietary software systems.

The maze of complexity, which I've seen and discussed firsthand, makes even the simplest transaction a whirlwind of inexplicably outdated computer systems.¹⁰ And it's so refreshing to talk, work, and grow with a community that just gets it. 🤝 This is the power of DAOs: long-tail collections of members from anywhere in the world with the ambition, passion, and dedication to pursue a niche relentlessly. 🧠

While we inevitably do this in our own interest, there are very few groups dealing with as massive problems as @WhyDRS (and thus internal, intrinsic, incessant motivation). Sometimes, people just want to get together to solve other smaller challenges. And that's completely fine as we start to work together with increasing autonomy!

3.1 Enabling Composability

When we talk about these decentralized community developments, almost all instances stem from grassroots, bootstrapped, bona fide labor. In this light, I posit that we must draw a firm line between work products that are owned, developed, and regulated by the community itself vs. private corporations. While the corporate structure serves markets extremely well, it does not adequately incentivize, condone, or recognize permissionless open-source innovation.

Free software means breaking down the fabricated distinction between web source and web product. It means giving the means of production directly to users. The next generation will not submit support tickets—they'll have the understanding, skillset, and motivation to open pull requests.¹¹

Specifically, the vast bulk of corporate entities keep their code secret, for employee eyes only. This secrecy is "a form of rent-seeking that creates scarcity where there is none."¹² If we agree that development is a form of artistic expression,¹³ then it follows that one person should be allowed to take influence from another through work-product observation alone. More pragmatically, this stops society from constantly rebuilding common infrastructure, as discussed on episode 29.

3.2 Defying Paradigms

Early days of web2 necessitated centralization because centralization is the easy answer. Stockholders give you capital, you build these protocols, and rake in profits.¹⁴ But we can tear down the barriers erected by these incumbents to gatekeep crucial infrastructure.

Through our incredible DRS advocacy, we're handing the SEC a proven replacement system for the insolvent CSD model. It is only a matter of time until the Cedes of the world, and their respective clearing systems, cease to manage the mounting FTDs. ⛓️‍💥 Accordingly, we need to keep our historic work public, auditable, and transparent—whatever it turns into.

All this is why I recommend we exclusively employ the GNU Affero General Public License.¹⁵ Given the acquisition of a blockchain transfer agent by DTCC, this seems to be the only way to protect our community from being squashed by plutocracy.¹⁶ It's a native solution that means all our work stays free, in the hands of investors like you.

3.3 Cementing Change

Affero has a particularly useful "viral effect" that effectively forces Wall Street to become open source if they use anything we make. That means direct insights into the most nuanced of margin methodologies, trade routing, and reporting data. More transparency, smarter markets, and honest decisions—that's what's at stake.

Today is the one-year anniversary of Taking Stock, and we are just a few days away from a year and a half since WhyDRS.org went live. 🎉 What do we want it to look like after another ten? Is it a vehicle driving change in our markets, decentralizing capitalism, and promoting sound public policy? Or is it a special interest group controlled by Wall Street through a pseudo-effort to grasp onto withering straws?

That's what's at stake when we assign our communal software licenses. It's what we bound ourselves by every time we touch the keyboard so that our children might have a shot at actually owning something greater than an entitlement. And it's about not making the small guys foot the bill for their own public advocacy endeavor.

"We're living through a really neat age where these digital cooperatives have some real teeth to them."

"We're constantly learning from different stumbles."

"This is a whole new form of organizing work."

— Dr. Christopher McCarthy

Footnotes

1. I did not grow up on the command line, and neither did billions of other intelligent people. ↩

2. In a similar light, I remember growing up on Discord with friends from school. From Minecraft to Overwatch, the platform was instrumental in shaping my early social ties. Perhaps serendipitously, this at-home collaboration so-to-speak primed me for the skills of a remote team member. ↩

3. At least some of our community has signed a number of SEC comment petitions before. These are a tremendous way to let regulators know our passions, but that's ultimately all that will happen. The centralized regulators do not have enough funding, infrastructure, or power to erect the holistic market reform apes need. ↩

4. And of course time! ⏳ These results won't come overnight. But by continually progressing to our final goal, we will build something radically unstoppable by purely collective nature. ↩

5. To view some of the context in this post, you will need to join these free servers. ↩

6. This expanded set of features, along with a clean user interface, lets community members maintain referenceable context, amend pertinent information, and remove outright spam (used sparingly; this one was phishing). ↩

7. This view has material delicacies which we ought unambiguously encode into Soroban, GitHub, and automation. On this week's Taking Stock, @PastaPastaPasta discussed the importance of this review process. Relevantly, see also his prior work, inspirations, and contributions. ↩

8. Id. Anybody can audit, contribute, and learn from our community—that's all implied. These are the innate benefits of developing in the public sphere. 🌐 But what about when someone wants to dive deeper? ↩

9. See public statement per prior discussion, release notice, and existing page. ↩

10. See COBOL comments, inter alia: issuer CFO, ATS accountant, and DTCC staff. ↩

11. I understand that most users probably never explore a line of code, and that's completely fine! But we need to give the pioneers of tomorrow access to fulfill their own aspirations—without spending hours communicating with centralized teams. They need the power any one of us should have to raise your hand, point out a problem, and propose a solution. ↩

12. See innovative post detailing the multifaceted conundrums facing innovation. ↩

13. See, e.g., creative incentives, rewards, and inspirations. ↩

14. See, e.g., digital services which act as non-libre intermediary platforms between transaction parties. ↩

15. Or GFDL and CC BY-SA for creative documentation media. ↩

16. Why do you think it was their first acquisition in ten years? ↩

[JamesAlfonse]

Fantastic write-up on how licensing choices shape our community and the future of open-source contributions! Your detailed exploration of ecosystem participation, labor coordination, and licensing implications highlights areas needing proactive, deliberate decision-making. Thank you for educating the community on these critical issues, ensuring our efforts remain impactful and sustainable. I fully support a push for transparency and innovation in every code commit and community decision.

[JFWooten4]

Generally accepted across community, and discussed further in today's DAO meeting. I'm closing out some older chats just to keep the feed/discussion list a little more manageable for new members (while keeping the door open for past references, histories, and lingering discussions).