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.
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.
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.
Nor does anything with Bitcoin.
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.
Also the claim you are asserting is laughably false. There is no magic button the developers have that can just force everyone to run their software.
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.
If there's been no exchange of money; how would they be beholden to stake holders?
The situation described in nullc's comment seem pretty horrible!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
So, I mean the analogy is false at any rate..
It's helpful to read the trial court decision which was being appealed here: https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2022/667.html
The license is discussed at 110, with the judge concluding that it wasn't strong enough to be dispositive in isolation.