The Cryptopians by Laura Shin

Author:Laura Shin [Shin, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

MING WASN’T THE only one who shot Ethereum in the foot when it came to IBM before DevCon 2. Andrew Keys and Bob Summerwill began looking into getting an Ethereum client into Hyperledger. Andrew even met with IBM’s Jerry Cuomo and another top exec there. As he put it in a chat to Bob, they “applauded our presentation of ETH and essentially said they’ll THROW OUT THE CODE THEY DONATED to Hyperledger and push for Ethereum to be the core of the Hyperledger fabric.” The problem was all Ethereum codebases were licensed such that any entity making modifications would have to contribute them back to the open-source project so others could use them too.8 Permissive licenses, however, allowed companies to write private versions of the open-source code that didn’t have to be shared back.9 This was popular with corporations happy to use open-source software as long as they didn’t have to give away the recipe for their secret sauce.

Andrew thought that getting Ethereum into Hyperledger required a permissively licensed codebase, and Bob nominated the abandoned C++ Ethereum, which, as a high-performance client, was a good option for enterprise. Gavin had actually previously explored that possibility. Bob and Andrew took on the task of getting the ninety-nine contributors to the C++ codebase to sign paperwork to make it permissively licensed. It was a five-month venture involving chasing down developers, taking them on walks, playing pool with them, or treating them to sushi.

In May, when Bob first embarked on the project, Gavin had told him via chat, “i’d certainly be happy to consider supporting a relicencing if there’s some inertia behind it.” But in August, a month before DevCon 2, Gavin, whose commits alone amounted to 30 percent of the codebase, responded to the latest of Bob’s messages about the licensing documents over chat: “is this about the license change? you’d like me to consider it?” He then asked that Bob not get Parity employees involved in EF efforts, “given that the ethereum foundation refuses to endorse or support our efforts with parity,” and went on to air grievances and perceived slights. (By this point, he had renamed his company Ethcore to Parity, after its first Ethereum client.)

In the end, Bob didn’t even hear the final answer from Gav himself. Brian Behlendorf of Hyperledger had a call with Parity: Gav’s firm had decided not to go through with it.10 Bob felt Gav was acting out of spite. Bob also wondered if Gavin wanted to kill a potential competitor to Parity. Gav said Parity’s lawyer, who handled the company’s licensing strategy, had decided against it. Parity had partly gotten its VC funding by pitching an enterprise Ethereum implementation, so if the C++ codebase was permissively licensed, it might compete with Parity’s future product.

To Ethereum developers, this epitomized how Parity approached work—competitively, not collaboratively. For example, the Ethereum ecosystem talked on one protocol, but Parity created a separate protocol just for Parity nodes.11 After multiple instances like this, Péter Szilágyi says he reached out

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.