Bitcoin Developers Attempt To Kill Open Source Project, Sends DMCA To GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin Developers Attempt To Kill Open Source Project, Sends DMCA To GitHub

solidcointalk.org

18 pointsredegg9 comments

Bitcoin is mainly continuing at this point only because of the large community behind it, as there wasn't much credibility to begin with. Doing things like this does nothing but take that community further from where it wants to be. It was an interesting concept, and still is, but that is all it will ever amount to if this continues.

I don't see how this helps the Bitcoin project at all, trying to shut down projects because a text file wasn't included? And with no prior contact before that? Seems like Bitcoin can't wait until SOPA is enacted to give them even more power against projects they don't like.

Where do you get no prior contact from?

The fact that SolidCoin had stripped the copyright notices from the fails and were fraudulently claiming to have rewritten everything (as part of their process of closing access to Solidcoin and putting it under a restrictive license) was a popular discussion subject on the AltChains forum and had come up multiple times.

They also apparently violate the Berkley DB license.

Did you read the link?

"On our side, we apologize for misplacing the MIT license that Bitcoin uses. A friendly reminder would all have been necessary."

They say a friendly reminder would have been enough, which implies they didn't get any notice except a DMCA take down. If SOPA was enabled right now they could have gone even further and got domain names confiscated for offenses as slight at this, a missing license.txt . It's inappropriate response from the Bitcoin developers.

And you believe it? Why? Google for solidcoin copyright. You can see the posts on bitcoin talk _months ago_ talking about this.

Looking for myself, it appears that they still haven't fixed the copyright notices. The file cited on the github page still has the mentioned code with nothing but a copyright notice by solidcoin.

And if there is no issue they could simply file a DMCA counternotice and get everything put back up.

I find it funny you haven't even bothered to read the link as it's all contained there. Is this the sort of effort you put into researching your claims? They say they are in the process of getting github back from the DMCA claim.

You must be a bitcoin developer because I can't see any reasonable person would suggest your first action in handling a situation like this is firing off a SOPA/DMCA claim for a missing mention in a text file. It's an open source project.

I think they have, but it takes something like a week? Also, there's an open question as to whether Luke Jr's modification was even substantial enough to claim copyright.

(For what it's worth, the same guy that did this is also running a 51% denial of service attack against my own pet Bitcoin alternative using the Bitcoin mining pool he runs. The other Bitcoin developer mentioned in that forum post - gmaxwell - is an op on the IRC channel for the pool and has been trying to stop me countering Luke's attempts to mislead people into thinking his pool wasn't involved in various places.)

DiabloMiner author and Bitcoin forum mod here.

makomk, enough with the FUD, eh? gmaxwell is not protecting LukeJr, nor has LukeJr done anything worth throwing a fit over.

This is offtopic for HN, take it elsewhere.

This is a non-story posted by the people who infringed and ended up getting DMCA'ed. The mods are encouraged to downvote or delete this. Knife fights don't belong on HN.

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