There is no alternative license text that could protect against something like this if the UK courts really want cases like this to proceed to trial. The problem is not the MIT license, so suggestions for alternative license texts aren't really relevant. The issue seems to be: some crank claims he lost a lot of money and he wants to somehow force the Bitcoin developers to get him his money back. If judges don't understand the technical issues, they can punt and say "let's have a trial to work this out", ignoring how expensive this will be.
Didn't loose any money. He is lying he ever had them. Multiple judges in multiple cases identifies his forgeries and lies. He is a serious fraud, but has some deep money behind him, so he can bully people via legal system.
It's not entirely clear to me that improvements to the license text couldn't help. For example, increasing its strength to an indemnification might have been effective here (at the very least it would put us in a good position to start demanding that he pay the cost of our defense right out of the gate).
It's somewhat common for commercial click-wrap agreements to include indemnifications now, but it probably shouldn't be-- they're potentially unfair and over-powered which is why I haven't tried my hand at drafting language.
But you're right that the license isn't the primary problem as they can't do something about an excessively dysfunctional legal system. The UK courts already have a pretty bad reputation internationally in other areas, such as in abusing them for defamation lawsuits resulting in US legislative action to block them (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPEECH_Act ).
And of course if volunteer open source developers are found to be liable, I imagine commercial open and closed source developers (Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.) will be liable for immense damages as well, so that will be interesting.
This will only apply to the UK? If you are a developer in US soil and you made an MIT OSS, I don’t think someone from Singapore can sue you in the US based on UK law?
It depends on the jurisdictions in question. The degree of enforcability differs across pairs and depends on the specifics of the case and the nature of the judgements. But even where enforcability is low, which we believe it would be in this case, having a foreign judgement against you is a bad thing, particularly one from a major jurisdiction.
As I explained in other comments-- even if you believe/hope it would be unenforceable it can still be unwise to ignore foreign litigation because you won't get a change to fight the case on its merits later should it turn out to be a problem. Perhaps if you were facing a likely unenforceable foreign case that you were sure to lose then you might be best off ignoring it.
I’m not a lawyer, but I do know that commercial treaties are a thing so maybe they can? I do vaguely recall some handwringing over treaty regimes like WIPO and WTO so maybe there’s something in place that would expose US nationals to enforcement here? I bet the lawyer who could answer that question has an hefty hourly rate.
> The claim alleges that the developers owe "fiduciary duties" and "duties in tort" to re-write or amend protocol code in order to give Wright access to 111,000 bitcoin
I suppose a court could compel core devs to accept such a change, if it came to that. But how could a court compel Bitcoin node operators to run that version of the software? That's what would actually need to happen, to give someone back their coins (or rather, a version of their coins that most people actually value).
Wright could make the change himself (or get someone else to do it) because the software is open source. It's getting everyone else to run the software that matters.
I think "a judgement against developers, but nobody runs the compulsion code" is still a pretty bad place to be in terms of precedent and it's safely in the territory of financial ruin for most developers.
Absolutely agree, I'm just thinking the suit is frivolous for that reason. The defendants don't have the ability (mind control over everyone who runs Bitcoin software) to fulfill a duty if they had one.
> But how could a court compel Bitcoin node operators to run that version of the software?
There's a plausible claim that the Bitcoin developers exert enough control over the Bitcoin network through their control of the official repository that operators would just accept it.
The claim has not been proven (and I think we all know that it wouldn't), but the court of appeals has correctly determined that it isn't their place to summarily decide that it wouldn't and that it needs to go to trial.
The court would not compel node operators (there's been absolutely zero entertainment of the idea that node operators are fiduciaries).
There isn't an 'official repository' -- a most popular one for sure. :) And most of the defendants have no control over it in any case (e.g. people like me that had stopped working on Bitcoin a long time ago, people whos involvement was limited to just submitting pull requests, or people who quit because what sane person voluntarily takes on this kind of harassment). Besides, if control over a particular github repository were really the criteria then Microsoft would be the most appropriate defendant :).
Part of the challenge here is that in summary judgements the facts are assumed in the facts are assumed in the favor of the non-movant so if you're in court against someone who is willing to tell arbitrary lies (because, e.g. their goal isn't to win, it's just to make you fold) you're severely disadvantages when it comes to discharging the case on a summary basis.
> In 2021, the London High Court gave Craig Wright's lawyers permission to serve papers to the 16 developers, even if they don't reside in the U.K.
So what happens if they just don't show up to court? Sure you'll lose by default judgment, and then you can ignore the judgment, right? If I got a court summons from some random country like Sudan or Botswana or the UK I would just ignore it. How could that backfire assuming I don't plan on traveling to Sudan in my lifetime?
The UK government ? Not so much. If the case has enough clout and import, the UK government has enough “multilateral conventions and bilateral extradition treaties” to make your life really miserable.
UK != Sudan, and there's weapons like extradition, sanctions, property seizure, garnishment, cross-jurisdiction suits, international travel restrictions on an ongoing indefinite basis, etc.
The smart move would be for them to club together and go and win in court, this case seems pretty ridiculous and the premise is very flimsy. Having a loss like this on the books and in case law would be harmful to the ongoing concerns of bitcoin.
This is pretty much what this lawsuit is about. He claims that it's bitcoin developers' fault that he lost access to "his" billions and they should restore it somehow.
Wait, not only is this batshit insane, the guy used to pretend he was satoshi nakamoto? Surely the actual satoshi nakamoto would have the knowledge to implement this, and also know that it would efectively be the D.A.O 2.0?
As a non-lawyer, I don't think it's correct to say that it has been voided. My reading of the appeals judgement is that there is no case law either way on whether open source developers could be considered to have a fiduciary duty to stakeholders (or under what circumstances that duty would exist), but there is at least a plausible case to be made. To establish precedent in a situation where none exists, the trial should proceed.
As far as licenses like the MIT license are concerned, though, the question would not be whether a fiduciary duty exists in this case, but whether that duty is based on the software license. Since Bitcoin involves financial instruments, I would think it much more likely that any claim of fiduciary duty would have to be because the Bitcoin developers or their organization are performing financial functions, not because of any open source software they are providing. So I'm not sure even a ruling against Bitcoin in this case (which of course I hope does not happen) would automatically make every open source developer in the world a fiduciary of every one of their users, regardless of license disclaimers.
Edit: The appeals court opinion that was posted elsewhere in this thread appears to bear out what I said above. Paragraph 40 of the ruling says:
"The essence of Tulip’s case is that the result of all this is that the developers, having
undertaken to control the software of the relevant bitcoin network, thereby have and
exercise control over the property held by others (i.e. bitcoin), and that this has the
result in law that they owe fiduciary duties to the true owners of that property with the
result that, on the facts of this case, they are obliged to introduce a software patch along
the lines described above, and help Tulip recover its property."
In other words, Tulip is claiming (rightly or wrongly) that Bitcoin is its fiduciary because Bitcoin controls what version of the software is used on their network, and therefore controls how Bitcoin assets, which are valuable property, are transferred from one party to another. That's a straightforward financial argument and does not have anything to do with any software license. It certainly doesn't imply that any open source developer assumes a fiduciary duty merely by publicly releasing software.
It most definitely does establish that any open source developer has fiduciary duty. Bitcoin is not financial software. It's nothing more than a peer to peer network with a novel consensus algorithm. With this precedent you could effectively sue BitTorrent developers for not modifying the code to keep backups of your data.
The software itself is not; but Bitcoin's control over what version of the software gets used on its network is a financial function, since it controls how financial assets (Bitcoin holdings) get transferred from one party to another. And that function is the basis for the claim of fiduciary duty, not the fact that Bitcoin publishes its software as open source.
> It's nothing more than a peer to peer network with a novel consensus algorithm.
The software itself is, yes. But the network is more than that: it has a particular party, Bitcoin, that controls what version of the software is accepted on the network. That control is what the plaintiff in the lawsuit is claiming as a basis for a fiduciary duty.
> With this precedent you could effectively sue BitTorrent developers for not modifying the code to keep backups of your data.
No, you can't, because there is no corresponding financial function provided by the BitTorrent developers. They don't control where you download files from or where you store them.
> not the fact that Bitcoin publishes its software as open source.
There is no such entity as Bitcoin, fwiw. Bitcoin is a protocol, a language, spoken by users (or more precisely, their computers) to bring about the bitcoin system. Like Roberts rules of order bring about a meeting. Bitcoin isn't the only system resulting from the software we wrote-- many people have created alternatives using the same software.
> But the network is more than that: it has a particular party, Bitcoin, that controls what version of the software is accepted on the network.
Well it doesn't but it's fair to say that the plaintiff has asserted it does.
> That control is what the plaintiff in the lawsuit is claiming as a basis for a fiduciary duty.
What the plaintiff didn't do is give any coherent argument for this control existing or even explaining why it isn't the plaintiff itself that has it (after all, he claims to be the creator of the system).
> No, you can't, because there is no corresponding financial function provided by the BitTorrent developers. They don't control where you download files from or where you store them.
By "Bitcoin", I mean the Bitcoin developers, since they are the ones the plaintiff is making the fiduciary responsibility claim against.
> it doesn't but it's fair to say that the plaintiff has asserted it does
And if the plaintiff's claim to that effect is false, their case collapses, since that claim is, as the quote I gave from the appellate court opinion makes clear, the "essence" of the plaintiff's case. That's all I am trying to make clear: that the plaintiff's case is based on its claim about the Bitcoin developers' control of the software version the network uses, not on a simple claim that the Bitcoin client software is released as open source.
I'm not the one asserting the claim: the plaintiff is. As I have already said, if that claim is false, the plaintiff's case collapses, since that claim, according to the appeals court, is the "essence" of the plaintiff's case.
The challenge there is how many millions of dollars is it fair to cost an volunteer open source developer to take such a thing to trial in order to establish a principle for a foreign countries laws? 3 million dollars? 2 million dollars?
Not to my knowledge, but that's irrelevant to the financial claims that the plaintiff is making. (To be clear, I'm not saying I agree with the plaintiff's claims; I'm just trying to be clear about exactly what those claims are and are not.)
But if you click on that link you will not find the word "warranty" used in any way, and in fact the bases of the case seem not to involve any warranty-like responsibility at all. So I'm confused.
The situation described in nullc's comment seem pretty horrible!
So, I'm also confused by your response. I wrote that it's not correct that the no-warranty clause of the MIT license has been declared void. And you seem to be saying that this is in conflict with the appeals judgement not talking about the warranty clause. But that's what I was saying! Nothing has been decided about the MIT license.
The lawsuit was originally dismissed without trial since the lower courts thought that the lawsuit did not have a chance of succeeding due to resting on the claim that the Bitcoin developers had a fiduciary duty to Bitcoin users (i.e. to act in the users' best interest). The appeals court thought that there's a legit case to be made for such a fiduciary duty existing. They did not say it exists, or under what circumstances it would exist. Just that there should be a trial to determine that.
You are right, but there is also a level of reality that needs to be injected: If open source can't be confident of a dismissal these kinds of claims on a summary basis it probably can't exist.
The cost of winning at trial is great enough to be ruinous especially relative to a volunteer effort.
In the case of Bitcoin we're probably better off in the sense that there are wealthy supporters willing to step up and take on costs. But there isn't anything about this that couldn't be applied more broadly to impose far ranging duties on other open source developers.
(FWIW, a fiduciary duty is far broader than just a duty to act in their best interest, it is a duty of single minded loyalty to put their interests over all others, including the fiduciary's own).
> But if you click on that link you will not find the word "warranty" used in any way, and in fact the bases of the case seem not to involve any warranty-like responsibility at all. So I'm confused.
I think the issue is that you cannot use a warranty to absolve yourself of a fiduciary responsibility. Otherwise your Bank would use a warranty to absolve themselves of responsibility over your bank account.
The legal case is not that the Bitcoin developers are liable for their software alone. It's that they might have a duty owing to the control they can exert over the Bitcoin _network_ (through their control of the "official" software repository). There are a couple of careful points to temper this judgement:
1. It's has not been decided that Bitcoin developers _do_ have some control over the Bitcoin network. The question of whether Bitcoin is centrally controlled to some extent or truly distributed cannot be summarily decided by a judge or the court of appeals. It _should_ go to trial.
2. It's not been decided that the Bitcoin developers have a fiduciary responsibility even if they do have control over the network.
3. It's not been decided whether or not Tulip could successfully argue that the Bitcoin addresses do in fact belong to them
3. It's not been decided what action, if any, the Bitcoin developers should be compelled to make if all the previous points are decided in Tulips favor.
No, this is false, because you have a direct relationship with your bank in the form of a contract, payment for services, and a direct monetary/depositor relationship.
If this analogy were closer to reality, it would be like claiming that a bank has a fiduciary duty to someone who not only doesn't have an account with them, but also put their cash money in a barrel and deliberately burned it.
Except it's not even that, because there's no bank-like structure going on here. The code itself didn't create the forms of money that followed—it merely recognizes it as valid on an ongoing basis from people who used it to perform that work themselves.
Thank you. Reading your comment, and then the link in nullc's comment, where the warranty language is included at para 110, it is clear that the warranty is not actually the issue but the disclaimer of liability.
I wonder if the license were modified to add, "if you do not agree to these terms you do not have a grant of license for this software."
Separately, when I look at the case, it seems to be a provision of service issue, so the software itself should be a red herring. Of course anything can happen in a lawsuit, even one that appears to be as illegitimate as this one.
For those of us that have absolutely no idea why this is on the top of this website:
This was posted by a Bitcoin developer. Apparently we are supposed to recognize them by name and immediately remember whatever lawsuits they’re involved in, in the UK.
I love the sting that HN has for bitcoin. Find me one other HN post that has full context. They're all links with the title of the linked source. This is a link aggregator.
it's their blog and they're entitled to write it however they want? The author writes some statement on their blog that unexpectedly gets traction on HN and because they didn't anticipate that, they're the bad guy for not writing the blog post as accessible and informative as possible? This person just wanted to note their thoughts down on their personal blog, but now they've wronged you somehow?
I just made a change to my licenses ([1]) to fight something like this. It basically makes the license null and void if any part of the disclaimer is not recognized by law. [2]
And because of this, I'm going to expedite getting these licenses picked over by a lawyer.
Nevertheless, I'm not working on any more FOSS until that lawyer says it's safe or the UK pulls back from absurdity.
Sure, the likelihood doesn't seem very high, but the very fact that this case is going forward means that the floodgates are open. I think it's likely that more cases like this will be filed.
In addition, if something like this happens to me, the results will be catastrophic and out of my control. A small likelihood of a catastrophic result is enough to say no because I have a wife.
The only thing in my control is to say no completely. So I will if I have to.
I'll probably start writing fiction again if that happens.
If you get back to fiction, don't forget to use a pen-name. You never know when a dictator, a cult leader, or a social justice warrior on the other side of the planet will find your writing not to their image of the world, and come for you.
However, as much as I'm usually cautious, I cannot feel good hiding behind a pseudonym. This is personal, though; there's nothing wrong with it. But for me, I don't want to hide from the consequences of what I say even if those consequences are stupid and unjust.
But the license does nothing for you in the UK, so time for change? I appreciate and like the intention behind being open source, but intentions and actions are not always on par.
Oh, this is about Craig "Faketoshi" Wright? Based on the ALAB (All Lawyers Are Bastards) episode on this case [0], I thought that Wright was caught in a bunch of obvious lies, tax fraud, and other fraudulent representations to the court and Wright would just be annihilated in court. Is this guy really trying to move this case forward?
There is a general takeaway: laws, contracts, etc are not in and of themselves indicative of legal outcomes. Lawyers and process influence legal outcomes.
That shouldn’t discourage the use of contracts, licenses, etc. But it should make you prudential when it comes to appropriate level of concern related to legal matters.
Why don't you wait to see how the court case is resolved before you throw your dummy? It's entirely possible the court will rule against Wright, setting a precedent that protects developers from this sort of legal action.
The fact that this goes to trial is alone enough to be disastrous. There are serious costs to defending yourself in a foreign country. And if you fail to do so, a default judgement can be entered against you.
I am not a lawyer, but it seems the issue is the following:
- For a contract to work it should be accepted
- OSS projects which are just available online, could be download without performing or even reading a license
- One of the important clauses to shield from legal liability is limitation of liability clause, i.e. you use the software as is, and won't be able to make the author accountable for damages caused by software
- MIT license has such a clause
- We now have a precedent when a developer is held liable due to damage allegedly caused by such software
> We now have a precedent when a developer is held liable due to damage allegedly caused by such software
Forced to go to a full trial over it, instead of being able discharge it on a summary basis.
This sounds a lot better, but in terms of the impact it's not clear how much better it is-- the cost from this will be almost entirely in defending it.
It's not about damages caused; the suit is over a claim that open source developers have a fiduciary/beneficiary relationship with users, and so have an obligation to act in their users' best interests. In which case, BitCoin devs would need to fork the chain to hand a few hefty wallets over.
> In which case, BitCoin devs would need to fork the chain to hand a few hefty wallets over.
It's even worse than that, of course, because creating the backdoored version they demanded wouldn't and couldn't make anyone run it (and it's inconceivable to me that more than a negligible number would-- particularly seeing how there are no automatic updates by design for security reasons). Their position is that we're responsible for it being effective too.
I think if it were just a demand to backdoor the software one of the defendants might have done so-- "Here you go, now screw off". But that clearly wouldn't have made the plaintiff go away (and might have landed them in litigation from the actual owners of the assets, even though the backdoor had no effect except maybe the creation of yet another forked blockchain that no one uses).
I'm not a lawyer, but I've asked these kinds of questions to lawyers.
Paraphrasing, the answer I got was: "Anyone can sue anyone for any reason, and then we have a legal process to determine the result. If you're a director of the company, they're probaby going to sue you personally, and you're going to have to spend a lot of money to argue that you personally shouldn't be liable. Hopefully you'll be successful. It'll all depend on the facts, so you'll need to get sued first before I can give you a better answer. Either way, it's going to cost you money."
My conclusion is that the legal system is not super great when a bad-faith actor is involved. Though, really, it's also not super great when good-faith actors are involved, either.
Some of the defendants (the developers of Bitcoin ABC now called eCash, an alternative cryptocurrency based on Bitcoin and its blockchain) had organized their development under an LLC. Hasn't helped so far, though in the unlikely event that the case is ultimately lost it might help them constrain recovery of damages to the assets of the LLC.
I think in general structural improvement like that are most effective against 'honest' opponents-- someone whos goal is to win and recover their costs and damages. A legal structure that limits liability makes recovery less likely, so they don't bring the action at all.
For an opponent who's goal is to harass and ultimately crush the opposition, I think that kind of tool is probably less effective. It's also harder to justify doing when you're just following a volunteer passion over something speculative and worthless (as was the case of the Bitcoin related defendants-- almost all of whom started close to the beginning of Bitcoin).
[And as an aside: to the extent that development is done on an uncompensated purely voluntary basis, it would be difficulty to legitimize the LLC, e.g. little to no income or expenses or other documentation that the LLC is anything but a piece of paper.]
But this also follows along the answers "since you're not in the UK why not ignore it"-- if a court later decides to allow recovery of assets that came from the LLC or pierce the corporate veil entirely you're screwed-- at that point you lost your chance to defend yourself.
Recommended a scheme to shield OSS developers from liability. I am not a lawyer, so it looked a bit overly cautious to me, but it seems that was a good idea.
The liability isn't really on the software itself, but the fiduciary responsibility that they _might_ have through their supposed control of the Bitcoin network through their control of the official software repository.
A Ltd company would help a little, but individuals within a company still have fiduciary responsibility.
Nope; in fact, the MIT license isn't really of consequence here except in that it doesn't address a possible fiduciary/beneficiary relationship with users.
The good news is that this is the UK court system. Unless I'm mistaken, the loser is ultimately responsible for the victor's court fees, and in this case, the other party claims that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, so I think we can pretty safely assume that the other party will win and presumable recover a lot of his expenses (perhaps someone from the UK can let me know how incorrect I am?).
Unfortunately, it will likely be quite traumatic and expensive to get through the trial first.
"Unfortunately, the court rules allowed for me to be sued pseudonymously, however, I couldn't defend myself pseudonymously. So I was put in an impossible situation of losing my privacy or losing the case in a default judgment. It sucks, but there's nothing more I could have done, really."
Cobra attempted to pay the 35k GBP but they returned it because he wouldn't identify himself, claiming that AML laws prevented them from accepting the payment without his identity.
The 35k was an amount the judge awarded pending a cost assessment from Wright's opposition. The fees were then increased to ~£600k after they submitted the cost assessment, which Cobra attempted to challenge but was denied again on the basis of anonymous parties having no due process rights in the the UK.
I have no idea if Cobra has the means to pay such a large amount, if they'd even take it either, but even if he did-- it would be terrible and not just for him personally since all that money would be sunk back into suing other Bitcoin community members.
The UK loser pays is essentially motion by motion, and doesn't normally recover more than 70% of your fees. This means that if you lose a lot before you win, you're screwed-- or even if you only win you're still screwed so long as the costs are great enough. 30% of your own legal costs on a case like this would be enough to ruin a lot of people.
You're also screwed if you run out of funding along the way-- which he'll try his damnedest to make happen, but won't work here.
It did, however, pretty much work in another lawsuit which should have been a win no easier than ours where the defendant ran out of money mid case and was forced to pull his defense and gain an almost automatic loss. Fortunately, he was able to prove on the way out that Wright brought the case on a fraudulent basis and his loss was reduced to 1 GBP (plus the 900k GBP he already owed from earlier stages, though with the potential for further reductions by a costs judge).
Not A Lawyer. The Court of Appeals decided to take this case to trial because it is novel and will probably serve as precedent for future cases. There has been no decision on liability and what not. Author is a bit overreacting. Sure, it's annoying and all to have to defend yourself. But seems unplausible that a decision would be made to ignore license for liability given all the repercussions, not just to this case, but to the software industry as a whole.
I’m not concerned that the case will result in a decision voiding the liability clause of the MIT license in the UK. That seems so unlikely as to be amusing we’re even discussing it.
I’m concerned that any court… at least any court with a reputation remotely in the realm of “not a plainly obvious farce intentionally designed to boast its illegitimacy for intimidation purposes”… would pick a precedent-setting case of this magnitude, where the defendant is anything but flanked by an army of lawyers.
By all means, set the obvious precedent. But there has got to be a case which isn’t set up to probably ruin the life of an eventually vindicated open source developer defendant.
Edit: and I should also clarify I’m not concerned about crypto or whatever. I’m concerned that anyone at all working on clearly warranty-free software can have their lives sucked up into a case of national and probably international impact just because some court decides to make an example of their plaintiff.
If the appeals court judges decided to push this case forward as a precedent (they didn't really, although they implied as much in their decision) it is not only completely financially infeasible to expect someone to pay millions of dollars to defend it, but it's also a *terrible* example of a case due to the absurd multi-continent-fraudulent behaviour of the plaintiff!
It will almost certainly not serve as precedent because of this fact alone.
> They didn't decide to take it to trial for this reason
Both in the decision and the permission to appeal the specifically cited the public importance of the subject area as a factor.
Which is great for them but of no concern to us -- you could say that it's an "some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment" to quote Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
A con artist has filed multiple lawsuits in the UK against the current and former (increasingly, as more quit) developers of Bitcoin demanding billions of dollars, part in retaliation for their failure to back up his obviously false claims of being Bitcoin's creator and in part as part of an insane plot to steal billions of dollars in Bitcoin. Unfortunately, his efforts are financed by at least one (and possibly multiple) persons with far more wealth than morals who have been promised a share of the spoils.
The poster of the linked article, Wladimir Van der Laan, was one of the most active developers of Bitcoin since 2011. I'm also another early bitcoin developer, now former, and another one of this conman's legal attack targets.
A key point about vexatious litigation, especially in places like the UK which lack protections against SLAPPs, is that the attacker doesn't need to win the lawsuit to achieve his goals: He can cause his victims millions of dollars in legal costs, phenomenal impositions on their time and privacy, and great psychological stress-- losing nothing himself but what he paid for his attorneys. Winning or not is more or less incidental, as the culprit here said quite explicitly online before commencing his lawsuits (saying that the intent was to destroy his targets and their families financially and psychologically). That fact that none of us were in the UK or had any dealings in the UK doesn't matter because open source software is available everywhere.
For that reason its important that it be possible to discharge frivolous litigation as quickly and efficiently as possible. As open source developers the cost/benefit of publishing our work can be pretty dicey to begin with, so it's important that the licenses we use not gratuitously open up avenues for litigation from the users since there are no revenues to pay for such things as a cost of doing business.
In his first lawsuit, he alleged to own billions of dollars in Bitcoin (coins which are already well known to have belonged to the MTGox exchange) and that in 2020-- coincidentally just as his obligations to repay his lenders were coming due-- thieves entered into his home to install a "wifi pineapple" to hack his computers and steal the keys and that when he discovered this "hack" he wipes his computers to clear the compromise, conveniently making sure there would be no evidence of the "hack" or ever owning the coins to begin with. The coins in question have not moved. He then filed a lawsuit against a dozen former and current developers arguing that as developers they have a fiduciary responsibility to introduce a backdoor into the bitcoin cryptosystem to "recover" "his" coins. In three years there has been no comment or apparent action by the police over this theft which, if it were real, would likely be the highest value heist in recorded history.
The case seemed obviously baseless to us, owing to obvious falsehood of his claims, the impossibility of his request (people would not adopt this backdoored version, even if anyone was willing to make themself complicit in his attempted theft by writing it for him), the pointlessness of it (he just pay someone to write it (or do it himself, if he could program) and half the defendants had long since stopped working on Bitcoin), the fact that even the police don't have a positive duty to save anyone from harm, and the unambiguous disclaimer of liabilities in our software license -- without which we never would have published it in the first place.
And keep in mind that he's already been found by judges in several countries to have perjured himself, submitted faked evidence, etc. in other cases (as shown in this collage of rulings against Wright, https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FoMUonbXkAEbJbL?format=jpg&name=... )
The trial court agreed ( https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2022/667.html ), ruling that his case didn't have more than a fanciful chance of success. But he appealed and the decision was reversed ( https://nt4tn.net/scammer-craig-wright/Tulip_v_Van_Der_Laan_... ). He's now gloating on slack and twitter that he's already "won" because we'll be 'ruined' by having to pay the 7-figure cost of his successful appeal and by publishing whatever dirt he can extract from our private data obtained in discovery.
(The second lawsuit, which has yet to come before a court alleges that the targets are violating "his" copyright by distributing the Bitcoin "block format" and bitcoin documentation, nevermind the fact that Bitcoin has been released under the MIT expat license since day one, and that this bozo's claims of being Bitcoin's creator are totally discredited and obviously false. He's also filed additional lawsuits against community members and journalists for expressing the view that his claims of having created Bitcoin are false).
Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin, the enforceability of the disclaimer of liability is critical to all of open source and the court's unwillingness to summarily dismiss an effort to compel the authorship and publication of a backdoor in a cryptographic security scheme from a supposed user who hopes to benefit from the backdoor should be a concern to all open source developers.
This is insane. The UK seems completely unequipped for a bad faith actor of this magnitude. I'm a huge cryptoskeptic, but what this guy is doing is straight up evil. I hope you and everyone else come out relatively unscathed, and I'm sorry you've got to deal with this loon.
Is there an organization covering the legal defense fund of these devs, or a crowdfund effort that you know of? Supporters of cryptoassets or not, I think we can all identify with this being a big problem that can bite us, as developers of free software, in other ways if we don't make a stand here with a case as visible as this. This is a dangerous precedent.
So far we've been able to keep our costs fairly modest, but as the case (now cases) go to trial the costs will likely balloon rapidly.
It's always a concern though because support might stop at some point, especially since the total cost is more or less unbounded. For example, in the defamation lawsuit against Peter McCormack his sponsored pulled out after the funds expended crossed a million UKP sticking Peter in the middle of some complex and expensive litigation and forced to withdraw most of his defenses because he couldn't afford the cost of them.
Fortunately, at the 11th hour he was able to prove that the claimed damages the case rested on were totally fabricated (the plaintiff claimed to have been dis-invited from academic conferences; McCormack got a statement for the organizers that Wright's submissions were rejected by peer review for being rubbish), resulting in McCormack ending up with a 1 UKP judgement against him ... plus some 900k UKP in legal costs (which he's currently fighting to get dismissed).
A challenge future fundraising may face is that the time-scales of court are not compatible with the attention span of the public-- the number one thing I hear when I have updates is "oh, is that still going on?". The second most common is "that guys a joke-- just ignore him, he only wants attention". Well, I wouldn't argue that he's not a joke, but even a joke can cause tremendous damage especially when everyone's reaction is to ignore it.
The opensats fundraiser was able to raise about $1.5 million dollars for hodlnaut's defense, which on one hand is a tremendous success--- but on the other hand is about an order of magnitude too low. Which is why I'm attributing problems here to the legal system and inadequate protections of open source licenses in light of them (MIT's waver of liability is arguably stronger than most too) rather than saying the community hasn't stepped up in support.
These high costs are because of money spent on defence lawyers? Fascinating. I suppose one wouldn't risk any but the most expensive lawyers lest one end up losing to this guy.
Yeah, sometimes people say "You're in the US, why don't you ignore it until they try to enforce it here?" -- and the answer is that sure you'd fight any enforcement in the US but you only have a limited set of chances to kill the case, and if you miss them they're gone. You absolutely will lose in court if you present an inadequate defense.
What a shame it would be to lose a transparently baseless case through mismanagement. Ironically, it's the strong cases that you're almost sure to lose that you might as well phone in or not defend at all.
In this case the plaintiff does everything he can to jack up the costs, including bombing the case with irrelevant stuff, gaslighting, etc. The courts have caught him doing this in other cases and chasized him in their rulings (complaining for forgeries and perjury) but the recourse so far has been confined to wrist-slap grade consequences.
A lot of the structure we have in our courts (both in the US and UK) to ensure good faith behavior is setting things up so that cheating makes you ultimately lose the case. But if you didn't seriously expect to win on the merits (instead only by the other side screwing up) and were mostly just trying to use the process to cause harm then it doesn't really matter if your forgeries and perjury ultimately cause you to lose.
This is honestly such a horrible abuse of the system. Too much of what we have is predicated on not preventing the Eye of Sauron from falling on you. Sorry to hear about your unfair troubles.
In the UK one must lose multiple cases under the same subject matter. He uses shell companies to bring the cases and brings them under wildly varying subject matter. It's pretext, but until it's attempted it'll be unclear if it'll be possible to get the court to see through the pretext.
Kinda. Generally 70% would be paid by the loser, and it works more or less motion by motion.
So for example, in Wright v McCormack, McCormack was able to show at trial that Wright's claims of damages were intentionally falsified. This got McCormack a 'loss' where he only had to pay 1 pound and where he was awarded his fees for the trial (well probably 70%, that hasn't been decided yet)-- but in the interest of finality the trial court declined to reverse the 900k pounds in fees he had to pay for the other sides costs in earlier motions.
This also potentially provides an additional avenue to hit your opponents during a SLAPP-- sandbag your costs so that whatever the opposition does have to pay on motions they lose are ruinous, and also so they have to spend a lot defending themselves so that 30% they can't recover is also ruinous.
Full cost on trial like this-- with discovery and experts, etc-- may be on the order of 10 to 20 million pounds. Would you expect a volunteer open source developer to be able to pay a non-negligible part of that, on top of the substantial imposition on their life and time that fighting the case and winning entails?
I presume you are referring to https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_sterling ? If you are doing it because of political beliefs, perhaps avoid that on HN, and should maybe using the £ symbol would be a suitable compromise instead? Although maybe it was just a typo, given you used “dollars” later to refer to USD
I had absolutely zero idea that there was any political baggage in using that string. Care you make a suggestion that doesn't involve a key I don't have on my keyboard?
The ISO currency code is GBP. I can't imagine using that being a political statement.
(And I'd never heard of anyone calling it UKP as a political statement, but presumably it would have something to do with Northern Ireland being a part of UK but not part of Great Britain.)
I'll avoid it in the future, 'pounds' is just confusing by itself to us Americans because its a common unit of weight. "He owes 100 pounds" "pounds of what? flesh?"
I don't believe they have any serious belief that they'll win. Their cases are just too factually deficient. Rather, I believe their hope is to ruin the defendants financially and force them into default. And, even failing that-- create a chilling effect to silence anyone who might otherwise be critical of their crooked schemes.
That said, other countries will frequently enforce foreign judgements. In this case, the specific performance they're asking for would likely be unenforceable in the US (and useless regardless) -- but damages might well be enforceable.
The most horrible part is that _they are allowed to drop their case anytime_ in the UK civil court. In previous cases when the accused has run out of money, the defendants have to pay their costs [1] to keep the trial running - with zero chance of being able to recoup costs because the accused will be bankrupt anyway. The UK state should not make private individuals fund the creation of novel case law; it's absolutely stupid.
> The UK state should not make private individuals fund the creation of novel case law;
If you read the appeals decision (and the decision that granted the permission to appeal)-- that seems to very much be the motivation here too: Case law on this subject would be intellectually interesting and potentially important in the future, so lets leave these foreign defendants on the hook to help establish it.
Beyond the ethical problems with that position to begin with, this is a terrible case to try to establish anything because it's so factually conflated that all the resources are going to go to sorting through the plaintiffs lies. The defendants don't have any particular interest in the UK establishing good law except to the extent that bad law in the UK may have international ramifications. (and even there not much-- defendants aren't businesses, they're volunteer developers many (most?) of whom have already quit participating)
Might be enforceable? I'm guessing there are some nuances here and I'm curious about them as my fast take on the situation would be to ignore it as unenforceable (if not living in the UK).
The problem with ignoring it is that if you later learn you were wrong about the degree of enforcability you can't go back and challenge the decision. Obviously the US defendants would challenge any enforcability and expect to win, ... that said we also expected to be able to get it summarily dismissed.
I don't think they expect to do they? They are just using an unlimited bankroll to punish people they perceive as their enemies with hugely expensive and stressful litigation.
Because generally UK judgements can be enforced in the US (and other places).
There are good reasons to expect that in this case they would be unenforceable in the US, but that isn't a guarantee-- and if they are you don't get to go back and fight the cause you lost by default and would have expected to win on the merits. So you're risking a kafkaesque situation where everyone is saying "yep, it's wrong and unfair, now hand over all your assets. thems the rules".
It's also the case that ignoring a judgement in the UK can get you found in contempt and subject to prison should you happen to find yourself (perhaps accidentally) in the UK in the future. Personally I have no problem never going anywhere near the UK in the future, and though "outlaw in the UK" has a nice ring to it, this does add to the incentives.
The person who runs the bitcoin website was sued by the same con for distributing the bitcoin whitepaper, and defaulted because the UK wouldn't allow him to defend himself without divulging his identity. He took the whitepaper down from the UK under threat of arrest (if they ever find him) and now facing hundreds of thousands of pounds of the opposing side's legal fees under threat of potentially losing the domain name (and/or prison, again if they can find him). There really is no silver bullet.
Default judgements can be the basis of internationally-targetted lawsuits aimed at enforcement of same; they can form the basis of arrest warrants, which implies never travelling to places where the UK can send police officers to arrest you, and while it would likely be an amusing basis for someone to start turning e.g. Linux into fiduciary liability for the purpose of legal trolling, who wants to facilitate that?!
Maybe it is time to enshrine open-source software development into law, and out of the realm of merely relying on an old copyright hack. It was a very clever hack, of course, but maybe the software industry has outgrown it and needs more legal basis to rely on.
> time to enshrine open-source software ... merely relying on an old copyright hack
the copyright hack you're referring to is the copyleft hack, associated primarily with GPL, whose hacker author (Stallman, and not that kind of author) chose to call "free software". (This is the idea that if you take a copy of copyleft software and use it to create a product, users of that product are permitted to see the source code if they want, just as you got to see the source code that you used to create it. If you don't want to agree to that, don't use that free software in your product)
the people who chose to distinguish themselves (ESR Eric Raymond) from "copyleft free software" chose to call their movement "open source", and their disagreement was precisely with the requirement that you share and share alike what was shared with you; and their disagreement was not in regard to whether it was a copyright hack or a signed contract, it was the meaning or intent of the express user permission to see the source (which they like to portray as a restriction on their right to hide the source)
so it doesn't make sense for you to conflate "open source" with the old copyright/copyleft hack, which more importantly has nothing at all to do with with warranties.
seems to me the issue OP has brought up has more to do with "click/shrink wrap" licensing. I don't know where the UK stands on click&shrink wraps, but seems to me you'd attack entire ediface rather than specific terms within (although I am aware that european regulators (and to a lesser extent american consumer rights advocates) obsess over customer rights to warranties)
This is incorrect; all OSS licensing including the MIT licence is a hack which defeats and circumvents the current automatic copyright regime.
The issue in this case is that for any software which is released by anyone, for free, no matter the licence attached to it, the UK courts are contemplating doing do may create a fiduciary duty between the author and the user based on the user's actions entirely.
The fact that FLOSS types both view this as an absurdity that couldn't possibly affect them, and in some cases that since Bitcoin is unfashionable in certain circles it is somehow just punishment in the form of psychopaths with money trying to ruin the Bitcoin developers and their families, while talking openly of shooting them all in the backs of their heads, on video, while fondling an illegal weapon that the cops in the UK are doing absolutely nothing about—well, this kind of blind eye they're turning to the developments in this case are astounding to me since there's no logical/sensible way to disintangle the notion that a user's actions are what create the fiduciary duty, from literally every other project on the planet.
What would that look like exactly, and how would it help in this case?
At the end of the day, there will still be conflicts over responsibility, no matter what the law or licenses say. Making authors of open source software immune from all responsibility in any and all circumstances doesn't strike me as a good idea, because it will also enable abuse by bad faith actors.
It doesn't need to be all-or-nothing. The broad standard in most law (that I know of) is sufficient: if you can establish a _mens rea_, you're entitled to damages.
Not that establishing intent to do harm would be easy, or that the law is effective or efficient. But if you're looking for a watermark to shoot for...
But isn't it the court's job to find out if that's the case? I don't see what needs changing here.
Or: the MIT license has essentially worked as intended for almost 40 years. Now one bad-faith troll abuses the court system. Do we really need to start panicking? Courts exist to settle disputes, and sooner or later some bozo will come by with a faux-dispute. It's kind of inevitable, and unless there's a structural problem – which doesn't seem to be the case – it doesn't strike me as something that needs new legislation.
The problem is that a volunteer developer will now have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars/pounds (according to nullc's comments in this thread) to defend against said bozo with a faux-dispute.
Panic? no. But this isn't the case that someone is conjecturing that the licenses protections would be inadequate, it's a concrete example of a case where they haven't been enough to control costs.
Maybe it's a one off fluke. Or maybe it isn't. I think that makes it worth discussing.
I think it's not difficult to imagine alternative terms that would have been likely to have a stronger effect.
The dispute is essentially that Wright claims to be the legal owner of some Bitcoins, and that the developers of the Bitcoin network are preventing him from accessing them. Whether Wright owns the Bitcoins is disputed. Whether the Bitcoin developers actually can do anything at all is also disputed. However, the ruling stated that the dispute has merit in the sense that it's a real dispute and that there is a realistic argument from Wright's side.
After reading the appeal ruling, the case seems to have far more merit than is presented. If you want to develop money-like software then you have to accept money-like responsibility. Where this responsibility starts or ends is currently unclear. I don't really have an answer what responsibility there should be, but a full rejection would be an absurdity: Bitcoin developers could legally push malicious updates which steal Bitcoins for example.
In short: there is a legitimate dispute here. The legal system seems to be working as intended.
> I think it's not difficult to imagine alternative terms that would have been likely to have a stronger effect.
The MIT license has a very strong "no liability" statement. I don't really see how it can be improved.
In many jurisdictions law takes precedent over contract. In the UK specifically liability cannot be signed away unconditionally and is always subject to reasonableness. This is the case for most jurisdiction, with the US being the notable exception I believe (although this may also differ per state).
However, it seems to me the entire thing is only tangentially related to "MIT license" or "open source" at all.
> but a full rejection would be an absurdity: Bitcoin developers could legally push malicious updates which steal Bitcoins for example.
That's incorrect and addressed explicitly in the trial court decision: a fiduciary duty isn't needed to prevent someone from behaving fraudulently.
And what he demands is an affirmative duty to act, which isn't even necessarily found in a fiduciary context, and is almost never found otherwise. E.g. you could be falling off a cliff right in front of a police officer who need only toss you a rope to save your life, and the rope is already in his hand-- he has absolutely no obligation to do so (in the UK or in the US, as a matter of settled law).
This is because duties to act are in conflict with duties to not act. If both can exist then there may be no safe move. In the US and UK we've decided that inaction is the safe move, so it's you to get sued for actions that cause harm and very hard to get sued for inaction that fail to prevent harm. Situations where it's reversed are special exceptions.
In this case the true owners of the assets would obviously have not only a reason to sue but to seek criminal charges if the defendants aided the plaintiff (it's his case that the defendants are already in breach of their obligation to rescue him, even though he did nothing to convince them that the loss was real or the coins were his before suing). Moreover, essentially every user of Bitcoin bought into a system with certain well described properties, including the impossibility of directly recovering lost coins-- a fact that was explained quite clearly by Satoshi (who the plaintiff fraudulently claims to be!). If it were possible for the defendants to change that and they did, every user harmed by undermining the system in that way would have a clear cause of action against them.
This kind of impossible bind is why our legal systems are extremely conservative in handing out these kinds of duties (both in the US and the UK, though the underlying case law is different obviously). It shouldn't be possible to accidentally and unknowingly end up being a fiduciary to total strangers who have no particular reason to trust you.
> If you want to develop money-like software then you have to accept money-like responsibility
Except no such duty has ever been found for commercial banks or central banks. If you claim to have lost your dollars you don't get to sue your bank or the fed to replace them for you.
Moreover, many of the defendants (most I think now?) are no longer developers and many weren't long before this supposed loss.
> I don't really see how it can be improved.
An obvious change which has become common in commercial terms of recent years is to require explicit indemnification. It also could have more expressly set out the non-relationship between the user and the authors.
One of the big problems here is that there will never be any compensation for the costs to us here. It's not like after we win all the costs will be covered and we'll receive a reasonable rate for the time spent defending it.
We gave our labor away for what we hoped was the betterment of the world, with no direct benefit to ourselves for doing so, and in return this is what we get: It's a really bad deal, and so Wladimir saying he regrets it is no shock.
The abuse and lack of gratitude from a few users that many high profile open source developers get is one thing... being dragged into a foreign court over something which isn't even argued to be your own fault is something else entirely. It's not like he argues that the results are on account of error or negligence on the part of the defendants-- much less malice!
Heck if you wanted to claim that it was due to a design flaw in Bitcoin--- well the plaintiff claims to be the person who created it! (...who spent the early days of Bitcoin explaining that there was no way to recover lost coins and for good reason, because any mechanism to do so would require third party trust which the system was designed to avoid).
None of that really counters that there is a conflict, and that legally speaking it's not quite straight-forward. I'm not the judge presiding the case; I don't get to decide one way or the other. I'm just saying there is a legitimate unresolved conflict, and that courts are the system we have to resolve that sort off thing.
> If you claim to have lost your dollars you don't get to sue your bank or the fed to replace them for you.
If I claim it's the fault of the bank? Of course you can.
The judge decided there wasn't one, it was the appeals court that differed. :)
> and that courts are the system we have to resolve that sort off thing.
If not for some fortunate historical luck it could only decide this wrongly, since but for some fortuitous turns we'd be forced to lose due to being unable to afford the defense. You can easily replay this situation with different defendants or a different situation and get that outcome.
If not for the impossibility of the requested remedy (and the fact that plaintiffs was never to be win)-- I don't see why it wouldn't just be rational for us to collude with the plaintiff and throw the case in exchange for, say, half the windfall. Fortunately for Bitcoin users the system is designed in a way to preclude that possibility, but not so fortunately for us.
> If I claim it's the fault of the bank? Of course you can.
At no point has the plaintiff alleged that the loss is our fault.
I have a set of licenses ([1]) set to be approved by a lawyer. Because of your suggestions, I've now added an indemnification clause and a clause disclaiming any relationship between user and contributor.
Major corporations have entire strategies built around open-source, with many household names that you know (Facebook, Microsoft, Google, ...). According to random estimates on the internet, open-source software is a $50 billion annual market. There's enough "there" there to get you something.
Hold the entire world's technology industry hostage.
Nice multi-billion dollar business you got there, be a real shame if somebody started introducing subtly-breaking bugs into that critical library you use, wouldn't it?
What exactly do you think the legal process accomplishes, when you have a bad actor with deep pockets that sues people that do not have equal means to defend themselves?
I can guarantee you that the Big Tech that does use open source takes a number of measures against this. They usually maintain a fork against the upstream repository, for one. There is no case where you could commit code to an open source library and immediately have it affect any Big Tech code.
I can keep going. The notion that big tech has the time or inclination to rigorously audit all the free software they're using is absolutely laughable.
If only there were a different license that kind of predicted all of this and governed itself accordingly? At least some kind of much better starting point from which to begin these things? If only someone had thought of that?
In all seriousness, it appears as if I'm the first to mention the GPL in this thread and I find that very odd. There's your starting point.
… if the MIT license's warranty disclaimer doesn't hold up in this regard, what makes you think the GPL's would, or for that matter, any FOSS license's such section?
The result allegedly reached here is absurd. No amount of legalese can defend against absurd conclusions.
Section 1. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of this Constitution is hereby repealed.
Section 2. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to publish or peaceably implement ideas.
Though, as I understood from reading comments here, the UK legal system is so fucked up and medieval that they don't have to win to succeed at their goal.
It's also true in the US that you can damage someone gravely through a lawsuit that's ultimately unsuccessful. The UK appears to be worse, both through the total absence of anti-SLAPP protections but also because norms that make it more process-bound willing to entertain such a weak case.
The UK "loser pays" model seems like it would be a benefit, but since the norm that they only pay 70% and that your share can be diminished by presenting a comprehensive case (diminished by every argument you lose) the incentives are complicated and its far from clear to me that it doesn't make it worse.
Wouldnt this be easily fixed by putting in a clause that defines the consideration to acquire warranty. "WARRENTY CAN BE PURCHASED FROM ALL CONTRIBUTORS FOR EQUAL PAYMENTS OF THE ENTIRE ANNUAL GLOBAL GDP AT THE TIME OF PURCHASE IN US DOLLARS"
You can't absolve yourself of fiduciary responsibility through a disclaimer otherwise your Bank would do it.
The fiduciary responsibility here isn't even arising from the software itself, but through the control of the Bitcoin network via control of the "official" software repository.
There isn't an official bitcoin repository, and for most defendants there isn't any repository that they control at all. The most popular repository is ultimately controlled by Microsoft, in any case-- though seeing as how they have significant resources
they weren't included as a defendant. :)
He's suing the defendants as individuals even where an LLC exists and was a real entity -- the developers of some of the bitcoin alternatives being sued performed their development work as a business. It may ultimately be that if the case was lost and the plaintiff tried to domesticate their judgement the LLC would successfully act as a shield. But you dun screwed up if that's what ultimately saved you. The advantage of these structures is that they make you less likely to get sued in the first place, since they potentially bound the recovery. -- but that doesn't obviously work against a vexatious litigant whose real goal isn't to win by merit and whos case isn't being funded by an attorney operating on contingency.
What you're suggesting also might be at rather large risk of being ignored by the court as pretext, or esp to the extent that it's not pretext, would be viewed by developers as compromising their independence, which is quite important to them.
There is no shortage of alternative structures that you could imagine putting in place if you knew in advance that this would happen ... but if every time you went to contribute to a piece of open source you needed to first form a non-profit it's pretty clear that there wouldn't be any open source! :)
So wright is claiming that devs should get him 111k btc based on them having to take the users best interest into account.
111k is like half a percent of btc? Them changing the code to hand over 111k would have severe adverse effect on the value lost to the rest of the btc holders. The trust lost should wipe out all value of all btc.
So the main claim that users best interest has to be upheld is bunk. He is not the only user.
Personally I am quite torn.
From the OSS side this trial is obviously tragic and a shame.
Then again it would be hilarious it btc would finally die because something like this.
We need a new open source license: UAYOR: Use At Your Own Risk. "This software will cause death, destruction, financial loss, and will make people think you're uncool for using it."
We have been working on a VS Code extension (link in my profile), which released some time ago. I had a thought that may be we should stick with the approach used by most of the ecosystem, when license is linked from the extension page. However, we decided to show accept/reject dialog. I am glad that we did it this way.
I have seen a large number of products (from SaaS to desktop apps) which don't properly ask for license acceptance to reduce sign up friction. They might be affected in the same way (I am not a lawyer).
This is irrelevant, since the theory is that a fiduciary duty exists completely absent any interaction, and any payment, whatsoever, or in the event literally anyone else pays you to do the work (including your employer), you are now a fiduciary of everyone who uses your software in any financial sense whatsoever.
So do you mean that limited liability clauses essentially void? This looks really absurd. How could we develop and distribute any software in such a context?
They're right - that isn't an open source license. Its a source-available license.
And yeah, I guess we could pack it in and abandon the idea of opensource. But I think thats really sad. I love the fact that opensource code I've written is quietly powering things in companies large and small all over the world. Sure; it'd always be nice to be paid more for my work. But thats still really cool!
> quietly powering things in companies large and small all over the world
Thats cool that you feel that way, but I absolutely do not. I dont like the idea of huge companies making millions, while the authors of the software "powering" their business get nothing.
Just to be really clear, if you feel that way I'm glad you're opting out of using opensource licenses. Not everyone wants to be an opensource developer. Not all code needs to be open source to have value. There's nothing wrong with that and that makes complete sense to me.
If you ever publish anything to npm / cargo / etc, I hope you make the fact your code isn't opensource very clear. I don't want to accidentally use your code in my projects, in violation of your license.
I understand that; but libraries I publish have dependencies. If one of my dependencies (your library) isn't licensed for commercial use, then my library also can't be used in commercial projects.
Thats a decision I want to make intentionally, if at all.
I'm not sure if it would really help in this case, as you could still sue if you use the software for non-commercial purposes. As I understand it what this lawsuit essentially boils down to is "I had Bitcoin, they were stolen, and I'm holding these people accountable for that". Merely owning Bitcoin is not commercial.
I hope that developers will not respond by updating their open source licenses. “This software may not be used by craig Wright or any organisation affiliated with him, nor any developers associated with his companies in any way including vendors, contractors and employees”
edited to add "claims he" based on a comment