@ebel @packetcharmer GPL is a complicated topic so here is a Hot Take:

the power of licenses comes down to enforcement. if cisco uses GPL net code in their firmware, it’ll never bite them in the ass unless the EFF or whoever has the resources chooses to make a stink about it. the GPL acts like a threat-of-costs, where they either have to validate license conformity in their stack, or set aside a war chest for legal fees.

@packetcharmer @ebel but if cisco or whoever judges that they’re stealing from someone without the resources to resist, then they have no reason to allocate fees for a legal defense. law is for the rich.

im inclined to believe that some systems cannot be effectively monetized, and if they can’t be monetized, then what footing have the corpers got to co-opt it? we can build systems so decentralized that there is nothing to steal.

@garbados @ebel one of my worries is if some entity that’s building out parts of the network abuses their position on it either directly or by having their equipment taken over by a malicious person/company to monetize the data going through it. Basically anyone that has any sort of controlling interest in the network can abuse that position and there’d be nothing we could do but try to replicate all of their connections so we could then kick them.

@packetcharmer @ebel community governance is my go-to answer, so that “whoever has a controlling interest” is actually a neighborhood org or a social coop rather than an individual, but i recognize that doesn’t preclude the issue or bad-faith sysadmins.

if a bad actor compromised all the nodes in a particular mesh, yeah, that’d be an issue. it’d even be an issue to figure out they’d been compromised! it’s a hard problem 🤔

@garbados @ebel I think the best solution is to do what they used to do for radio stations and allow no entity to own more than a certain percentage of nodes in any area, even as a coop. Also for security concerns there will be minimum requirements for setting up the nodes securely and that security will need to be tested periodically.

@packetcharmer @ebel that’s an interesting approach 🤔 i feel like i should look more into the history of radio and how it has been administered over time.