Aave V3 Launch strategy: Code licensing

If the license were to only be granted at AAVE governance’s discretion, it wouldn’t really be any different than any other licensed software where the owners predictably leverage their copyrights of their code to the ecosystem’s detriment, and basically picking winners and losers by choosing who gets to use their code. That’s the kind of dynamic I refer to when I mention negative incentives. Not that I think AAVE would engage in this kind of behavior, but the potential is there.

Honestly though it’s just a dumb nitpick. I think having the code be restricted for a short time is definitely reasonable. Also, it would be a really interesting experiment to have source code rights owned by a DAO.

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no i understand your point and i don’t think its dumb nitpick.
Look at the flip side though: We are talking about community coordinated forks. The Aave governance could provide know-how, help in evaluating security and market risk, and especially help the users discerning between money grabbing schemes and legit aave forks. A collaborative fork on the other hand might provide participation in protocol development and expansion of the Aave IP.

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I agree with this idea and the idea to protect the protocol and grow for a set period of time after wich it can open source

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The problem if the code/license belongs to the owners of Aave is that a entity can attack by holding the right to vote or the Aave token simply, it is enough that an entity is sufficiently powerful for some time to be able to abuse the code, the idea of keeping it under license for some time and releasing it gradually seems to me well relevant

What is the risk for users and/or owners of Aave?
I may contradict myself but I also think that innovation should not be kept secret and that it should be shared, and that it proves the success of a project if it is forked or if there is innovation around it, but on the other hand it is necessary to know how to protect it and to admit that it belongs to an entity in a certain way, at the beginning at least

Is there a risk if it belongs to an entity that it could be legally attacked?

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I would like to know the advantages and risks as well, I think that it is necessary to take into account the energy and the time that the developers devote to build such an effective protocol and that it is necessary to understand the ins and outs, for the moment it is difficult for the common man to understand the differences, in any case even by rereading I have difficulty to understand clearly the stakes

When it comes to licensing the code, the risk, at least legally, are very, very low. The only real risk there is that if the developer team used already license restricted code and build it into AAVE v3 without permission, there is a legal case to be made by the license holder of that piece of code to sue. In that case, the newly incorporated AAVE DAO would need to fight that legal battle, because it licensed (or for the pirated code “sublicensed”) the code. But this is surely not the case. But then again, we all know about patent trolling, so it does not necessarily need to be the case for someone to sue. In any case, this could also happen if we release the code open source, as this would also be considered sublicensing.

And there comes the, in my opinion, big risk factor with this. Incorporating the DAO brings up a slew of questions that are as of yet unanswered. It basically is a whole new adventure. What about taxes, legal representation, regulation, etc. Some of those questions can be answered (just incorporate the DAO in a tax haven like Bermuda, where there are no corporate taxes), others can not be answered (will the AAVE DAO be considered a bank, as it renders bank-like services?) as of now.
The question here is more: Will the AAVE DAO take on this adventure as one of the first DAOs?
I have no doubt in my mind that regulations will come eventually. Not simply because I think if cryptocurrencys and DeFi want to become mainstream, there needs to be a societal bridge that enables trust in it - that usually comes with regulation. The crypto world will not survive in what could essentially be considered “anarchy” right now.

But, I digress. The tl;dr is: There are risks that can not be calculated today. But there is also opportunity.

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Aave V3 is definitely innovative and Bring various significant features to the Defi protocol, like , a cross chain lending protocol feature allowing assets to he moved between the deployment networks, awesome move towards reducing fees and transaction time.

But as it is pretty obvious among creators and developers, having the V3 licensed instead of being open sourced like the previous versions could be very limiting towards the creatives and innovators, if the code/license belongs to the owners of Aave is that a entity can attack by holding the right to vote or the Aave token simply, that entity can sufficiently abuse the code.

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Limiting creatives and innovators is not the goal here, you’re right. This is why there needs to be room for exceptions, which would allow the governance to license the code out. This, as I mentioned, would in best practice never involve monetary incentives, as that might steer the DAO to just give it out to the highest bidders.

The second part I don’t quite get. Do you mean a 51% attack on the governance? That scenario is highly unlikely. I hear this argument often about PoS system - they might be “vulnerable” to attack. Keep in mind, right this minute a 51% attack would cost an attacker about 1.5 billion dollars if they buy it OTC (from whom?) and far more if they would buy it on the open market. And all that to control the license of the code base for the v3 AAVE protocol?

And what do you mean by abusing the code? If someone wants to abuse the code, they could simply look on chain and have the code base there. Why would someone with the goal of “abusing” the code go through the trouble and take over the AAVE DAO?

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I was looking around to check if it’s possible to amend software licenses and in what scale. It obviously isn’t possible (you need to create a custom license) but some discussions I read were very interesting, for example this one mit - Can I modify an open source license to require that I be notified? - Open Source Stack Exchange.

What if we just establish a “fair forking policy” for the codebase, so that if the codebase is being used to fork the protocol, the Aave community can contribute in providing advisory for security, configuration and collaboration. It would be a soft policy to incentivize participation within forks, and not something to be enforced - having forks that collaborate with the creators of the technology helps ensuring the safety of the users.

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The discussion in that thread doesn’t really come to an end, does it? They’re talking “free open source” as opposed to just “open source” and if it is possible to amend the MIT license to get a forker to send a notification to the original creator.
But in my opinion, the definition of open source is pretty clear. There can’t be any restrictions.

Quote from Frequently Answered Questions – Open Source Initiative
Can I restrict how people use an Open Source licensed program?
No. The freedom to use the program for any purpose is part of the Open Source Definition. Open source licenses do not discriminate against fields of endeavor.

So in any case, restricting it, even by as little as requiring a notification to the original creator would make it not open source.

But say we’d license under a custom license that would require the forking project to get into contact with the AAVE DAO. In that case, the license would need to be copyleft (meaning derivatives can only be published under the same license as the original). If it wasn’t, there could just be one team, notifying AAVE that they would like to fork the project, then fork it and release it under a different license, which could be open source.
In that case new projects that want to fork v3 will just fork the relicensed open source version, forgoing the “hassle” to notify the AAVE DAO.
If it is released under a license with copyleft though, AAVE v3 will never become open source, ever. It’ll always be under that restrictive license.

This, in my opinion could be achieved under the Business Source License. There just needs to be a rule set for the AAVE DAO to act by when considering forking requests. Like I said, I think monetary incentives for the treasury would be a bad influence. In a, in part (!), hyper capitalistic crypto community this will probably end in highest bidder = most likely to be a allowed a fork.

To be honest, I don’t know how the DAO would react to forking requests in general. Restricting with the Business Source License could be considered an experiment. See how the DAO reacts and works with or against forks. And in the end, it would be only a year of restrictions. It would be interesting to see.

my concern in this case is more the work needed to bring an eventual business license forward. There is some legal involved that might take months to actually get finalized. Not sure the community wants to wait this much to release V3.

Well, I can’t really find anything substantial that would tell me the time it might take with the incorporation of the DAO.

There are general overview articles:

Theoretical papers:

And services like these in the US:

I personally would be reluctant to incorporate anything in the States. The most promising options are Malta or Switzerland.

In any case. The longer we discuss this and not bring it to a vote, the longer it takes.

I’d propose to bring the issue to a vote and keep it very transparent that there is an unforeseeable amount of time it could take if the option “restrictive license” is voted for. But I would pin it at at least six months. As opposed to no waiting time if it is open sourced.

The vote would probably naturally flow towards the open source option.

And after that, another vote can be put forward to ask if the DAO should be incorporated, so that it might be ready if the question comes up with a potential v4 in a few years.

hello to all AAVE governance, I offer you my opinion among the other governors, my opinion is that it is essential to keep open the essential integration codes so that aave is established in the various DAOs and other products of the different actors, and would also pose a problem of decentralization if this is the decision of the governance, integrated an integration portal or something of the kind would be an idea among the opinions to change the governance policy.
Sincerely yours, thank you for hearing my voice among governance.

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I think this can be put to vote. I will create a snapshot proposal with the following three options:

  • Business license
  • MIT
  • (a)GPL

in the next few hours. If someone else has other opt\ions, there is still time.

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vote is up

https://snapshot.org/#/aave.eth/proposal/0x483f30ac318ac7e26fbc9804a48ccd9126078d19c91f19a53c56aeacb7689f4a

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I was very happy when I heard about the AAVE V3 launch. I was expecting something better from AAVE but when I came to know that it won’t be an open source I felt bad for it. AAVE is digging its own grave. Me as an AAVE user I want you to change that decision to change its OS for all and don’t kill the room for growth. As a developer I must point out that this could potentially lay off many innovative projects with not much funding and redirect them to other chains, none the less on an open-source IDO will be cheaper due to low gas fees. Just like me many more people are sharing the same opinion and losing their faith in AAVE.

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acutally not really. I’m happy with that and voted accordingly.

They say that knowlege increases with sharing …but this hasn’t got down well with aave…
The recent V3 version certainly is an improvement over the previous versions (for instance L2 specific features, cross chain facilitaion, allowing to extract highest borrowing from collateral etc…). But aal these features gets overshadowed by one drwaback i.e. V3 is licensed instead of open source.
Although ,licesnsed software provides improved security, practicality…but it hampers innovation…which is the very backbone of the crypto world.
open source provides a more diverse scope of design perspective that a single company could ever offer…

I am a student and I’ve been coding for few years now. For me, Open Source is very crucial for the growth of the tech and I’m unable to figure out why even at this time people are not helping others to grow. Every product over blockchain should be open source as it opens new paths for development. It is like going backwards to fascism. Licencing such good projects makes it limited to devs and not all devs can benefit from such a good tech and idea . The Aave as it was before should keep their code OS so people can develop and build new improvements in its code . IMO, it is a bad step and Aave team should think about changing it.