Read on Twitter
tl;dr if your app is successful, and uses Metamask, ConsenSys claims the right to demand you pay them https://twitter.com/metamask_io/status/1296586344299294720
Going from MIT to non-commercial freeware, commercial-use-inquire-within is a huge FOSS bait and switch. I can't think of any other project that's done this in the space.
This is likely to funnel large enterprises into discussions with their sales team. "You cannot decompile Metamask" (which is already available in source form) will have internal legal scrambling to get a license before devs can play around.
If you fork the repo and create a derivative work, you have to put the world on notice that the resulting work is the property of... ConsenSys.
"Non commercial uses" are provided. Personal use w/o commercial aplications, use by charities, NGO or gov't, or small applications with no users = non-commercial. But ultimately whether you owe ConsenSys a license fee is to be "determined by ConsenSys in its sole discretion."
ConsenSys says that it needs to do this to "compete with products that exist upstream... such as web browsers." Never mind that Chromium (which most people use to browse) is entirely FOSS.
The company tries to downplay the impact on developers. "You can still copy, modify, and distribute... but we invite you"
In legalese, this is "pay us a fee or we will have the right to sue you for copyright infringement"
In legalese, this is "pay us a fee or we will have the right to sue you for copyright infringement"
From a legal standpoint, ConsenSys may have a difficult time asserting copyright against folks who have forked the codebase *prior to* yesterday; they granted rights under MIT, and it would be unprecedented for a project in crypto to try to clawback what has already been released
(The new license unquestionably permits CSys to enforce copyright in any future forks of their codebase.)
If I were in an in-house legal team though doing a software license audit, I'd see the prop license as a red flag that says "if you use Metamask commercially, come to us before we come to you."
For most corps it's simpler to pay the toll and resolve any uncertainty up front.
For most corps it's simpler to pay the toll and resolve any uncertainty up front.
Good question re CLAs. No clue how much care they exercised over contributions over the years.
More to the point though, it's a huge betrayal of the Ethereum dev community to get everyone hooked on a tool and then yank permission to use it. https://twitter.com/buchmanster/status/1296830791280992257?s=20
More to the point though, it's a huge betrayal of the Ethereum dev community to get everyone hooked on a tool and then yank permission to use it. https://twitter.com/buchmanster/status/1296830791280992257?s=20
Making MetaMask proprietary to try to extract license fees from browser and wallet devs is defensive, red-ocean thinking. If they were playing on offense they would have released an Ethereum-friendly fork of Chromium with MetaMask natively built in.
For avoidance of doubt, "uses" here = "uses the code" i.e. forks https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/1296826723305127936?s=20
Interesting question. ConsenSys could charge users or applications for use of its APIs in future, if it wished. It hasn't done that, but there's nothing in principle which would prevent ConsenSys from doing so. https://twitter.com/andrej_muzevic/status/1296839859336818690?s=20
This is the sort of thing that keeps IP lawyers awake at night https://twitter.com/TheBlueMatt/status/1296841376030695424
DApps don't "use" Metamask any more than Facebook "uses" Internet Explorer. They're on Ethereum, the Decentralized World Computer, remember? (Or is everything on Infura/AWS now?) https://twitter.com/avsa/status/1296842949582557184
