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Comment by itherseed | Hacker News Reader

You should be always skeptic but when someone write "Pure transparency — trust our code, not our words" in an EXTRA BIG font, you should be extra skeptic.

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(co-founder of anytype) our main promises are privacy, end-to-end encryption, user controlled keys, self-hosting, p2p sync - all of which should add up to what we can user autonomy from the software provider which we believe to be important. To prove these claims the best way is open the source code. As promises of encryption and ownership stay promises unless you can be sure of it. That was one main motivation and why we think it's worth highlighting.

Is there a way to make sure I am using the code you published and not a different version?

We do releases in the Github Actions CI. So you can inspect the CI logs and published artefacts(desktop/android). Then you can compare the binaries checksums. I would appreciate ideas on how we can make it more transparent

So I see the networking portions of the code are Free Software - that's great. How are people expected to use it if their use does not fall under "non-commercial use" as defined in the client license? Do you expect people to write their own clients for commercial use, or do you offer commercial licenses?

For non-commercial use, you're prohibited from selling it, but using it within your organization is permitted

You do realize this also means that a for-profit company can’t use the software at all, right?

Unmodified, modified, whatever.

I don’t think that was your intent, but that’s exactly how it reads. Or maybe that is your intent?

The idea if you want to sell clients, you need to get a permission form our association.

Why not use the GPL?

Because we want to provide other organizations with the opportunity to offer paid sync services, we needed to incorporate the concept of a network into the license. We crafted the license with that consideration in mind

> Because we want to provide other organizations with the opportunity to offer paid sync services

Why do you think the GPL is not compatible with this?

Exactly…

Plus, they can always offer other licenses in addition to the GPL (or really AGPL would be a better fit for their concerns). It’s their software, so they can license it to anyone with whatever terms they want. (Assuming there aren’t outside contributions, but even that can be dealt with)

> Plus, they can always offer other licenses in addition to the GPL

Yep, that's exactly what I was thinking. They're clearly offering alternative licenses to the one in the public repository. There is no reason the same tactic couldn't be applied with the GPL.

You may employed a wrong strategy.

To prevent paid sync services, you should license your protocols and data formats in AGPL, which requires derivative work (third-party sync services) to be open sourced.

The client app in contrast, should be fine even in permissive licenses.

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