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Comment by avallach | Hacker News Reader

This looks great!

But with all these mentions of democratizing and opposing centralization, the licensing model seems unclear to me. The Croquet Microverse is Apache-licensed but "built on top of Croquet OS" which seems to be proprietary with paid and centralized server. Does anyone understand whether at least the client side component of the Croquet OS, which interfaces with the Microverse, is open source so that alternative server implementation could be developed without legally dubious reverse engineering of the protocol?

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> Smith has been in touch since the publication of this article to clarify Croquet's positioning on open source: "All of our frameworks are open source. The kernel of the system – the virtual machine and the reflector – is currently not open source though.

> "This is mainly because of our concern about handing our business over to Amazon. We plan to open source the entire system once we are fully deployed. In fact, the fully decentralized system we will be making available next year will need to be open source."

> He added that while the org has pricing for its web-based products (here), it has "not established pricing for Croquet for Unity yet – this will be set once we have the commercial release in the next few months, but will be very competitive."

Croquet's always been peer-to-peer, with no need for servers. It sounds like they've made a small server to "reflect" traffic between clients that can't directly communicate (like using a STUN server to coordinate SIP/WebRTC).

> Does anyone understand whether at least the client side component of the Croquet OS, which interfaces with the Microverse, is open source so that alternative server implementation could be developed without legally dubious reverse engineering of the protocol?

I don't think any reverse engineering is needed, since the protocols (e.g. TeaTime) were published decades ago. AFAIK the existing Smalltalk clients are FOSS (OpenCroquet/OpenCobalt); there have also been JS ports in the past (I think as part of Qwaq/Teleplace/Terf), but I can't remember if they're FOSS; those may be the same as this "Croquet OS", or this could be a rewrite.

(Yes, this project has had many names over the decades!)

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