ZeroTier Releases LF: A Fully Decentralized Fully Replicated Key/Value Store | Hacker News Reader

ZeroTier Releases LF: A Fully Decentralized Fully Replicated Key/Value Store

zerotier.com

Author of LF and founder of ZeroTier here. I think my write up was a bit wordy so here is some more TL;DR:

LF is like etcd or consul (or so far just the data store aspects) but for decentralized systems that can be run by multiple parties across trust and organizational boundaries. It's an orchestration backend for decentralized apps.

We are going to use it to fully decentralize ZeroTier and for some specific enterprise customer projects, but others can use it for other stuff.

Big fan of zerotier. But not a fan of GPLv3. Would you consider a different license?

We've thought about it, but the alternatives we have considered are those that restrict cloud SaaS monetization. Mu guess is that you don't like those either. We are a commercial venture and licensing to for profit users is currently a lot of our revenue.

Copyleft discourages me from adopting the technology, I'm not much for including anything with a copyleft license in my stack. I clearly understand the need to make a profit and have nothing against it ... I understand that you feel that SaaS monitoring would be a problem and that this project is not just technology to support your primary product (the zerotier network stack), but that it is a product you wish can generate a profit on its own. Maybe the ideas behind CockroachDB's work could be helpful? https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/oss-relicensing-cockroach...

CockroachDB's license is exactly what we're studying. We're also eyeing their technology for future use, though for the moment stock PGSQL still wins due to query complexity.

I'm curious to understand why you're so anti-GPL though. Linux is GPL and it hasn't stopped people from using it.

The GPL is not perfect but at the time we adopted it there were no other good alternatives except more permissive licenses that would have led to other companies just taking our stuff and monetizing it without compensation. We are not interested in charitably donating free labor to Amazon.

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