Thanks to everyone who participated in the community debate

I would like to summarise the best points and explain our decision:

Points against:

"If you are worried about low effort fork coins, which are barely a step up from scams, I doubt they will care about licensing. So I would assume they will rip off anything that isn't bolted down regardless." [ 1 ]

That's a defeatist attitude. Why do anything at all then? In my opinion even if someone gets the code hosted on a bulletproof server, what are they going to say? "Hey, we stole the code, but we totally won't steal your money?"

"open-source is best because if this team fucks it up, it means someone else can take the work done and lead it in a more positive direction" [ 2 ]

One of the best points against. We addressed this by adding a fixed sunset clause - in six months the code is going to be in public domain.

"Trust will decline as a fork cannot use that code. [...] Even if the source-available is limited to a defined time till it gets open source it would delay a fork which could be time critical and therefore lower trust." [ 3 ]

I'm probably a dumb sheep since I don't grasp the logic here. You don't trust BMW because they won't let you build the car yourself and sell it on?

Monero guys made a surprisingly strong representation against:

"As already mentioned in other posts, low effort pump and dump shitcoins will rip your improvements anyway regardless of licensing terms, so the only benefit to you is to prevent Monero devs from copying your code (and instead having to reimplement it from scratch) since you are feuding with them. The effect of source-available will be to label you as an opponent of open-source in the eyes of open-source devs." [ 4 ]

Apart from the rehash of the defeatist point, this adds a fairly interesting dimension - "don't do it or Monero guys will FUD you". To be frank they called me every available name under the sun by now probably. I don't think "enemy of open source" is going to make a huge difference, but it gives me a chuckle that the same guys describe open source as malicious. [ 5 ]

"As was my AMD OpenCL XMR miner (at the time, the only one comparable to Claymore's) which you took off my git and combined with another poor dev's CUDA to make xmr-stak, with a 2% fee your way. It's not like there's a legal issue - you do as you please. You need no one to co-sign your shit - if I said I didn't think you should take the option you wanted... would it really change your mind?" [ 6 ]

He probably didn't realise that one of us is a fanatic open-source zealot =). [ 7 ]

Points for:

I will quote only a single post here since it has five good reasons (sorry to everyone else who outlined points for):

• Ryo isn't a billion dollar coin. Keeping it open source will spawn a dozen copy cats all claiming to be better than it.

• Ryo shouldn't just survive based on acknowledgement for it's improvements. People will recognize fireice's work regardless whether the project is open source or not. Claiming that people will only recognize open source is not correct.

• Ryo needs to survive now. It's has less than a million dollar MC. And if it were to open source now, it will be a death sentence. We are in a very niche section of CryptoCurrency. Not lot of people know about the coin. Right now would is not the right time to open source the project.

• Things are changing, projects now are protecting their work. Fireice's should do the same. It is his work, and he has the right to bear fruits to his labor.

• Ryo needs to differentiate itseld with the competition. Open sourcing it now will kill this. You can be sure ryo will die with noone to see it if it open source it's work. [ 8 ]