I’m planning to open-source soon—ideally it’s eventually a protocol, not a centralized service! (Once we figure out what “it” is…)
I’m trying to balance benefit to the commons with retaining some privilege/flexibility. Tell me why this licensing plan is a bad idea?
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What's the right analogous protocol? Something crypto related or more like TCP/IP?
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Right now I think it’s maybe more like it wants to be an easily-syncable file format. As implemented now, it’s a hash tree of log nodes, which I suppose you could sync with Git.
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Got it! So when you say you want to avoid commercial copy-cats you mean that you don't want to fragment the ecosystem with competing standards?
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I’m not so worried about competing standards. Somewhat concerned about competing “narratives” for what the medium is. But mostly: open-source SAAS and end-user apps are often cheaply repackaged as misleading for-pay services/apps (happened with KA back when it was OSS!).
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Got it. But KA was different. In this case, there’s a much tighter network effect. If we all agree to play by your rules, you have created a genuinely useful reason for websites to push information to me.
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Here’s hoping, yes! :)
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So there’s less incentive to create a clone, and I guess the dynamics end up being pretty different.
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Right. I think the story may look different if I were to e.g. start charging for service-layer stuff, analytics, SSO, etc. No plans to do this at the moment, but the asymmetric privilege in this licensing scheme is a concession that helps me sleep better if patronage fails.