Open Sourcing RFI: This is the Way

One of the core ethics of blockchain is open source software. It’s how we can iterate quickly and develop sorely needed governance, data, and economic infrastructure for the 21st century.

So it’s been a bit of a controversial subject that RFI (and ELE) code has claimed copyright protection. Morpheus (the develop of the Reflect and Elevate tokens) has recently announced he’ll be opening up the code with a GNU General Public License v3.0.

This is the Way.

But why would he have copyrighted the code in the first place when blockchain is so tied to the open source software movement?

Here’s an announcement from Morpheus about it :

“Hey all. When I wrote the code for RFI I put quite a bit of effort into it to ensure the code is functional and secure. I then took the risk of launching the code with my own capital.

I previously did the same thing for a project called Flow Protocol. With Flow Protocol, a group of people copied the smart contract and website completely and launched a clone where they proceeded to steal 300 ETH from investors in their project. They then sent those people to me and told them I was responsible. I was harassed for some time about that project which I had no involvement or connection with.

I thought at the time of RFI launch, that putting a copyright notice on code and making it clear that I had no involvement with clones would avoid this situation again. Unfortunately this only has created more FUD and unnecessary drama.
Anyone who has been a part of a project which I developed knows my commitment to decentralization. It is my belief that RFI will be stronger and more decentralized if it is open source. RFI code will soon have a change of license making it open source and will be effective after it is announced and published on GitHub later this week.

That being said, I believe the community and ecosystem being built around RFI to be far superior than any clone and I see innovation happening faster here than I have before in any DeFi project.”

In short, blockchain is FULL of scammers and leeches. Especially in the DeFi space. The intention was to protect not just the nascent Reflect ecosystem but also unsuspected crypto investors from bad actors.

Not to stifle innovation.

The technology behind RFI is fundamental to the ecosystem’s success but the real irreplaceable asset is our gem of a community and our ability to innovate.

If we can’t succeed on those terms we don’t deserve to succeed at all.