Commons, assets, licenses, governance

The relevant aspect of the initial announcement email is this, from @dilgree (you can see the whole message here on the Global Credit Commons track thread :

THE PLAN

The next step is to turn this specification into working code. This should be relatively straightforward, as Matthew and Tim have between them decades of experience in building such systems, and the specification has been carefully refined. Nevertheless, the devil is always in the detail, and we need additional skills in the core team to achieve this.

Code, though, is not everything: we have done some business strategy thinking too.

Clearly, it is highly important that the first implementation of this protocol be developed and nurtured by people who subscribe to the deep purpose of the project. The fashion for open source has led to an assumption that to be viable, everything like this needs to be made open-source from the outset. We disagree. A commons is not a free-for-all. It has members, with rights and obligations, non-members with fewer rights; it has a boundary.

This commons will be, for some time, a tender seedling in a forest of aggressive giants. We don't think it is safe to just let it go for anyone to use as they please, until we have established a strong cultural presence that makes it clear what it ought to be. Otherwise it could end up like libra-coin - carrying the 'mutual commons' label, but implemented in a manner that subverts our intent.

So we intend to control the protocol until we have grown something that is viable - having at the same time grown a governance platform that can manage its further development. We can't know the shape of this development at present, so we're starting small and simple. Three people committed to the vision, a simple legal identity, owning all the crucial work (both software and branding, domains etc), and with a clear intent.

This approach is also crucial for making the project a credible investment proposition.

Consequently, we are protecting the work through a simple Non Disclosure Agreement. This is not about mistrust, but is intended to convey seriousness of intent and understanding. ]The NDA can be read and signed here](https://creditcommons.eversign.com/embedded/8a61439d795a42088211628862646787) (a simple process - you can just type your name). There is more detail in the preamble, which we'd be glad if you would read. We hope this makes sense to you, and look forward to hearing from you - soon, I hope.

The document repository is a private gitlab project. Once we have your agreement, we will add you to the project, and take things from there.

Response from @lynnfoster and @bobhaugen :

Thanks for thinking of us, and glad to hear of the progress you all have made on these worthwhile ideas.

However, Bob and I will respectfully decline to sign the NDA and are not interested in participating in a closed source project.

We understand the impulse, and acknowledge the difficulties of protecting one's code. Even with protective licensing, it can be stolen for private use. And we can't really compete in a court of law either, too expensive and distracting.

But.... We think this is the wrong way to think about it. It is a waste of valuable time to compete with the capitalists. We need to go full speed ahead with developing working alternatives, on the ground, and supported with software. Nothing they do with copies of our software will impede our progress, and even if they try, it is not worth hamstringing the commons efforts with the risk of just 3 people (who may even be in the same place at the same time occasionally) owning a useful project. Think of potential collaborators like us who may contribute, and then lose that effort if something happens to you 3 or you turn evil, even if both are very unlikely. And extend that to the associated efforts everywhere - the point of open source is that it can seed positive things far and wide, as well as attract help, sometimes even in a fly-by-night unexpected way.

A commons is not a free-for-all, but you can form and govern a small and growing commons without cutting off others from resources that can help the broader effort. One thing we have is numbers, and to go "full speed ahead", we need to set our resources free so all of that creativity and labor of the multitudes can do this faster than any small group of us. Lots of activists are moving in parallel, it is a time of experimentation. All of this will work better if we do everything we can to enable collaboration. Let there be lots of commons, who can feed each other ideas.

Again, thanks much for contacting us. We hope you reconsider and would look forward to collaborating on something like this if it becomes open in the future.

Response from @matthewslater :

Thanks for putting that perspective Lynn.
I'm very sympathetic to it.
Dil and I can't think of any specific ways in which a Credit Commons could 'stolen' from us and turned into something else. I think Dil just wanted to start cautiously. The OCN team in London is clear that it wants to seed the network not to own the network. He also reasoned with me that until we have a working client (I'm working on something at the moment) so few people will want to engage it makes almost no difference.
Our work so far is on Gitlab, waiting for the right time to be opened up, and I guess that will be decided by members, which at the moment is Dil, Tim and me.
I'd love to hear what Tim thinks, if he'd like to say.

Response from @bobhaugen :

P.S. y'all might also want to scan
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=why+investors+don%27t+sign+ndas&t=h_&ia=web

Response from @lynnfoster :

Thanks so much for your understanding response, Matthew.

Response from Dil Green:

Lynn,

This is a great conversation to be having.

I doubt we'd be having it if we'd just invited you all to (yet another) git.

I tried to make it clear, but I'll re-iterate - the purpose of the NDA/private approach was mostly to make a point. No-one is anticipating anyone ripping us off anytime soon [or even noticing us], and in order to get to the place where someone might, we will need to have opened up - we have no intention of keeping the work private for any length of time. My vision at the minute is that a Credit Commons Protocol Foundation should be something like the Linux Foundation - culturally owning the brand, pre-eminent on the basis of trust, service and excellence (not control), deeply engaged with the preservation and development of the ethos of the kernel, but not exerting ownership rights. How to get there is what concerns me.

Like you, I am utterly uninterested in competing with capitalism. Indeed, as you are aware, that is the fundamental point of my own approach to systems change and civilisational survival - as set out in the Transcender Manifesto.

'Commons' has become a bit of a buzzword, sprinkled liberally. Ostrom is often mentioned, but few have read more than the wikipedia page (including me - although I do at least have her book..).

The notion of commons we have is from history, or from places that capitalism has ignored. These are mostly physical locations - fundamentally rival.

I am painfully aware that the specific character of a commons in the arena of non-rival digital tools is weakly understood, and even more that the way it has been working has led to the enclosure of the internet, the looming enclosure of bitcoin, the way that linux has powered the likes of amazon and google to amassing more power than most nation states. One concern of mine is that perhaps the position of the Linux Foundation - widely seen as a bastion of open-source values - is in fact an artefact of the role it plays in powering these organisations - just as charitable trusts are artefacts of capitalist culture, rather than desirable human institutions.

So this conversation is hopefully one of many others that are needed to explore what and how a commons might be in this novel context.

As Matthew says, my primary feeling around this at the minute is caution and awareness of ignorance. If you know of places where wisdom around this is more advanced, I'd be pleased to be introduced.

Practically, I would be interested in your views on the commons clause, which seems to me to be an attempt to grapple seriously with this subject.

In the spirit of 'working out loud', would you be happy for me to put this conversation into a thread on the loomio group, so that it can be open to others with an interest?

Finally, if anything above has changed your mind, it would be wonderful to have you look at what we have.

Response from Dil Green:

Bob,

Response to Lynn's points elsewhere, but just to say we have no intention of taking direct investment into the project. The investment model is based on Chris Cook's 'nondominium' work, around selling access to use-credits, rather than selling shares or taking loans.
I can say more about this of you're interested.

The original email didn't, but should have included a link to Chris' Nondominium work.

Response from Dil Green:

Lynn, Bob,

Also, just in case you didn't look at the NDA at all, here is what we say in the preamble:

Non-Disclosure agreement : Credit Commons Protocol : Technical Stack Outline

Preamble

Why an NDA? This will (should) be the first question you ask. If this is a commons, then surely it should be open to all, open-source?
Good question.
The answer is that if this is a commons, then there are commoners, with rights and responsibilities, and non-commoners, with fewer rights. A commons has a boundary.
The first and foremost responsibilities of the developers of the Credit Commons Protocol stack (right now, this means Matthew Slater, Tim Jenkin and Dil Green - a roster that will hopefully expand, and soon) is to ensure that the commons that we envisage building is, to the best of our ability, an unenclosable one.
The work that has been done on the development of the outline provided in the original Credit commons white-paper is potentially precious.
Not precious in terms of money, but precious in terms of the value to humanity of a viable means-of-exchange system that operationalises and enshrines trust as the empowering mechanism of a global civilisation rooted in locality (valuing equally both physical and ontological locality).
What we have right now, though, is a seed, a sketch, nothing more.
Our second duty is to nurture this seed; protect it, help it grow, develop, become strong. Strong enough to compete in a forest that is already full of aggressive and greedy giants.
If we are to do that, this small idea must become resilient, capable, robust, useful and strongly recognisable as a nameable thing - a Credit Commons. This builds a protection more resilient than any legal force - a strong cultural identity.
If we don’t treat this seed as precious, but simply strew it far and wide in the hope that it will grow somewhere, we are likely to see all manner of straggly weeds and bizarre mutations, as projects are developed without our vision.
The worst outcome, of course, would be to see a tall, strong version of this thing which has been mutated to serve profit extraction, and which moves faster and with more certainty - because it can easily attract investment, because it has a simplistic measure of success - shareholder value - and nothing else.
Examples abound of just this process happening to wide-eyed optimistic projects - http/html, the idea of the sharing economy, Facebook’s Libra. Open-source inventions thrown, with fanfare, to the wind, followed by extractive and self-serving ‘embrace and extend’.
At present, we can’t be more specific about how we will protect the project from enclosure. We do understand, of course, that to succeed, a large part of what we build must become open-source (our vision, clear as it is, may not be the optimal one - we must let others be free to try alternate approaches, to improve).
But until we understand the project itself in more detail, until we can undertake work to assess specific threats and how they might be countered, until we can thoroughly understand appropriate licensing, and while the condition of privity is not detrimental to the development of the project, we believe it is the correct choice to keep this as a members-only commons.
That’s why this is an NDA.

Response from @bobhaugen:

I'd be interested in a conversation about how to deal with
The worst outcome, of course, would be to see a tall, strong version of this thing which has been mutated to serve profit extraction, and which moves faster and with more certainty - because it can easily attract investment, because it has a simplistic measure of success - shareholder value - and nothing else.
Examples abound of just this process happening to wide-eyed optimistic projects - http/html, the idea of the sharing economy, Facebook’s Libra. Open-source inventions thrown, with fanfare, to the wind, followed by extractive and self-serving ‘embrace and extend’.

Capitalism does that. It's the evolved exploitation logic of the system. Anything anybody can extract profit from will be mutated to extract profit.

Only way I can see to deal is to develop something strong enough to preserve its integrity. That's more about the internal integrity of the project than the external threats. Bitcoin~>Libra, for example: bitcoin had no integrity to start with.

How do you see a mutual credit system being mutated to serve profit extraction? How can a mutual credit system foster a mutual-benefit logic in the people and organizations that use it?

Response from @lynnfoster:

In the spirit of 'working out loud', would you be happy for me to put this conversation into a thread on the loomio group, so that it can be open to others with an interest

Sure, I hope it can be a useful discussion.

Finally, if anything above has changed your mind, it would be wonderful to have you look at what we have.

No, this is a fundamental issue to me.

A number of people have studied and created licensing schemes, there are things to choose from in the open source arena that offer some protection, although as I said, I don't think it matters very much if you don't intend to spend time and money in court anyway.

I choose to spend as little time as possible on those sorts of activities, it is a net negative to the movement for anyone who has any other skills that can be applied towards actually creating something new (software, governance, organization, production, useful knowledge, personal development of themselves or others, cleaning the common bathroom, whatever). It is a distraction, and I feel some personal sorrow when activists get caught up in these activities to the point where they are holding back their work or other useful work. Because the situation on the ground is urgent, we don't have unlimited time.

I don't know you very well, but something for us all to think about: Anyone I do know well who claims to be working for the post-capitalist movement (to not get caught up in the word "commons"), and does not by habit open source their work, has some conscious or sub-conscious desire to feel like they have something like their own startup, or maybe their own club with "like-minded" people (people who they agree with, but more importantly get along with, often with a class or even race or gender basis). This is "normal" in capitalism, none of us escapes internalizing some of these things, and it is very difficult to recognize and more difficult to get past them. I occasionally struggle with a feeling of "ownership" of work I have created, and I think almost everyone does. It is liberating to give that feeling up. (Again, I don't know if this is part of your thought process in this case, but thought it might be useful.)

Of course people need to have an income or way to live, and sometimes there is contradiction there. But I don't understand that to be part of the issue here.