GNU Taler 0.0.0 released

People who write code and release it under a BSDL want people to use their code. ALL people! Users and business. That is called freedom. You, whoever you may be, are free to use this code any way you see fit just don't sue me. The GPL on the other hand hates proprietary software. Good for you. But keep in mind in your induced hatred of proprietary software, that it is usually proprietary software that innovates and pushes things forward. Free software developers are great. But they only work generally on things of interest to them. They don't solve the "hard" problems unless someone pays them too. Take ZFS. After fourty years of fs development what does OS have for FS's? Linux has btrfs? BSD is still using ffs, hammer maybe. That's really... Sad. It took millions of dollars and I don't even know how many man hours for sun to create ZFS.

Or the UI. Look at what Apple has had to spend and the time require to create the HIG and the UI for OS X. And yes I'm sure some OS jackasses are going to attempt to declare kde or gnome etc as equal or superior to the OS X UI. But that is plain flat out disingenuous. They are not even in the same ballpark. And the apple UI is far from perfect! And the OS UIs are light years behind it.

The point is the BSDL encourages everyone to use it. We believe in true freedom.

Will bad people do bad things with it? Probably, but that's inevitable in a FREE society. The GPL on the other hand tries to enforce it's imperialistic view of "freedom" by the barrel of a gun. Or if you don't want to share that flawed world view don't use our code. Which is fine, your free to hold that belief. But don't call it freedom and don't expect people who understand freedom not to call you on your bullshit either. The GPL is not free. It has stings attached to its use. Continuing to claim otherwise is disingenuous at best and outright lying at worst.

And i object to the wording "it's caring about users enough to not allow someone to take advantage of them by taking your work and giving them a proprietary version." This is absolute nonsense and bullshit Linux/GPL folks have been using for 20 years. You cannot make bsd licensed code proprietary. Period. What you can make proprietary is your own added value code on top of it. The original unmodified code is still free, still under the BSDL, still available for a user to take and use as he sees fit. The original code doesn't magically disappear to a land of unicorns and leprechauns the second someone forks it and modifies it in a proprietary way. That's simply untrue and disingenuous to keep vomitting that line.

That said, here are to me the most salient points:

* Exchanges (essentially banks in Taler) must have external auditing; there are no in-built technology mechanisms for noticing or defeating over-issuance

* HTTP/HTTPS focused -- this is intended to be an API-layer tool

* Token based, so you could use it with any system you want

* Government audit friendly -- it tries for high levels of privacy for users and almost none for merchants as a conscious decision to be bad for money laundering.