Ethereum (ETH) veteran Pascal Marco Caversaccio shared details of his open-source Uniswap v4 fork being one step away from a DMCA takedown. Uniswap (UNI) founder Hayden Adams admitted that this attack was "unnecessary" — here's why.
Copyright wars in open-source DeFi: Who is able to fork Uniswap v4?
Caversaccio, a long-term contributor to the EVM ecosystem, announced yesterday, Aug. 4, 2023, that the Uniswap (UNI) team attempted to take down the fork of its v4 version published on GitHub. The developer added that he only opened this pull request to change the license status of the code to "Affero General Public License" with no plans of commercial usage.
So Uniswap wants to take down my Uniswap v4 fork from GitHub, which I used to open my famous PR to change their License to "AGPL-3.0-only". Are you for real @Uniswap? What kind of pathetic move is this from a party that can only play copycat nowadays?https://t.co/ECVSDV8mIJ pic.twitter.com/afQnb9URN3
— sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root / (@pcaversaccio) August 4, 2023
This move was necessary to make Uniswap (UNI) truly open source as its license should allow everyone to commit to its code base without limitations:
It should be the logical consequence for Uniswap to use a proper open-source license, as introduced in this PR, in particular since you invite others to contribute for free! Otherwise, your open-source claim is just simply a meme
By printing time, this idea scored support of over 300 Ethereum (ETH) developers on GitHub.
However, Uniswap Labs representatives initiated a DMCA report to the GitHub team and stressed that the action by Caversaccio should be considered a copyright infringement. He only had seven days to remove the Uniswap v4 fork from his repository.
It should also be noted that yesterday, Polygon Labs accused zkSync of copying a large portion of Polygon's SNARK Plonky2 code base in the Boojum upgrade.
"Takedown was unnecessary," Uniswap (UNI) founder says
The Ethereum (ETH) community was enraged by the action of Uniswap Labs. Rotki app founder Lefteris Karapetsas stressed that simply publishing code cannot violate any type of license:
FYI, opening a PR to your repo does not violate either the BUSL, the AGPL or any other license
Today, Aug. 5, 2023, the Uniswap (UNI) founder Hayden Adams responded to the accusations. He apologized for the actions of his team and admitted that taking down the Uniswap v4 fork was unnecessary.
Agree the takedown was unnecessary considering its just a github PR and not in production. Was not aware until I saw this tweet, but quickly dug in and we will be withdrawing the takedown / agree it was a mistake. Sorry about that
The status of the Uniswap (UNI) software license caused debates in the crypto community. Ripple CTO David Schwartz highlighted that with a BSL license the project cannot be considered decentralized.
Arman Shirinyan
Tomiwabold Olajide
