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Quote from: ChuckOne on January 04, 2015, 10:46:23 am

Quote from: GlassBox on January 04, 2015, 03:39:39 am

Not insinuating anything...however, a common miconception in crypto (perpetuated by Jeff's Garzick's statement's on the topic) is that NXT isn't 100% open-sourced. Some comments in this thread suggested that the dev code, at least, isn't completely open. (An interesting point, although it's not mission critical like the live source code is). Thus we wanted to be super-clear on the open-source issue - even to the point of belaboring the point. Thanks for providing more clarity on this.

The source code is open source since 0.4.7 and that was a long time ago.

Jeff made some statements too quickly and without proper research done. This topic is extremely complicated and relies on many philosophical and information-theoretical assumptions (regarding software in general and crypto in particular) that I will not bring up here again because different people different assumptions to be true. Sorry for being too abstract on this but we finally settled this by the following:

NRS development currently does not follow 100% standard open-source software development and especially building, packaging and distribution. But the current approach works and I am confident that time will shape that process to be better and better over time as we grow naturally. If in the end of this natural shaping process stands the usual standard procedure, the better. A confirmation for the standard procedure and confidence we did it right.


Another issue that comes up regularly is that people say "Why not making development public as well?" That as well is an extremely sensitive issue and also based on several assumptions and lack of knowledge how things work. We currently do not consider making the development public for three reasons:

1) Simply not necessary because it is done when it is done anyway and only the fully implemented code is relevant as only that works; half-backed code does not work and is therefore not relevant.

2) Simply not possible because developers develop on their own machine. We cannot make that changes public as developers machine are private property. What happens once in a while is that developers push changes to another place (could be a USB stick, could be a remote repository, could be our private repository). The possibilities with git are endless. We will not surveil our developers (not as long as I am in charge). They are free to do what they think is best to do their work. And if it means they only push finished features after 2 months from their private machine which means the same as not making development public in the first place.

3) hinder adoption by clones

4) changing just because of the sake of changing does only draw development resources away of which we have little to waste


I hope that sufficiently covers all cases of "Nxt is not open source."

That's a very helpful explanation. Mind if we quote you in a follow-up article?

Sure, go ahead but please remove my mistakes regarding the English language.

I want to thank the GlassBox team for their review, criticisms and feedback on what the SuperNET looks like from the outside. Though at first it seemed like FUD, they have shown their interest in the truth and are open to feedback and criticism them selves.

I also admire the civility of discourse in most if not all of this conversation.  Thanks to their report and the following conversation and debate I believe we have a more concentrated amount of information which I and other will be able to pool from and show the level of transparency and due diligence happening inside the SuperNET. It is there it is just buried in forum posts.

Thank you all.