Shower Thoughts

Ethereum builder & people connector. Juicebox, Revnet, Defifa & Footy App

1. Rebrand first

2. Then open source mobile and web monorepo

3. Backend not open source

4. Algo not open source

Cool so they hired the guy building the main alternative client to kill it, they're rebranding to the protocol name to cut the legs out from under the others, and it's going to be proprietary software forever.

Made https://reality.eth.limo. 

Live in Mashiko, Japan. Mainly post about goats.

Also on bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/goat.navy

Base is launching a client with an order of magnitude more users than our client. So it’s actually increasing decentralization.

Super wasn’t open source.

And we’re planning to open source our clients.

Working on Farcaster and Warpcast. Longer thoughts at https://dwr.email

You just said you're planning to keep essential parts of the client, the backend you need to make it actually run, closed-source.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice that the incredible community of builders we have here will finally be allowed to fix your bugs for you

We won’t accept PRs. It’s purely for people to see / fork the patterns.

The protocol is permissionless. People are free to build FOSS if that’s important to them. If that doesn’t happen, then clearly not important yet.

Anyone can build on it but at any time you, or optimistically in future you and one of your investors, can go "oh hi people aren't going to see stuff you post with that client any more".

If you and your investor have defacto control of what all the users see, you may as well skip all the snapchain business and use a normal database.

Open sourcing the client doesn’t solve this issue.

> 1. If you screw your users someone can fork the software and provide an alternative with the same experience

This sounds good in theory, in practice -- you won't get most people to switch and just because the client is open source doesn't mean you can easily manage all the infra.

> 2. improve one thing

Again, it doesn't work in practice. These are complex systems with lots of dependencies. Browser market is a great example of this. The only serious Chrome forks are all big, well-funded companies.

These are all theoretical arguments.

Open sourcing the client greatly mitigates it because:

1. If you screw your users someone can fork the software and provide an alternative with the same experience

2. Having a reference client you can fork accelerates other clients, because they only have to improve one thing instead of getting parity on everything