It is a significant challenge to make things compatible with open source licenses as they are written these days, at least if you ever want to make significant money off of it. This is a bit of a carryover from a lot of the social assumptions of the people who actually write these licenses and have written these licenses, who believe that making money is morally tainted in the first place.

My position is that I think that trying to dictate whether digital applications which touch the blockchain are open source or close source is inevitably doomed to fail, upfront, because it's simply unenforceable and flies right in the face of the design of the technology.

Unless we want to demand that all the voting bots on the steem blockchain prove that there open source and provide that source to us, which would then require that we be able to detect them immediately upon touching the blockchain, keep them from being able to interact until they were checked off, and then allowed back on.

We can't even detect bots consistently.

So – since it's impossible to actually make this policy happen, discussing it is at best a waste of time.

Which is just not going to happen. They have a vested, very direct interest in getting as many digital applications using the steem blockchain as possible. To that end, they have an aggressive pressure not to care whether or not the project is open source or not but rather whether or not people will actually use it – which is entirely orthogonal

And if we're being cynical, often the closed source solutions end up being better developed. The developers end up having I'm much stronger vested interest in doing a good job because no one else can take their work and run.

That doesn't apply to all things, of course. Anything that depends on a level of trust of the user in order to get the product they desire is going to have a certain extra level of cachet if it's open source. Anything that makes claims about how things work is going to have an extra level of assurance if it's open source.

But streaming applications? That's not a big deal.

Steemit Inc. has made a lot less reasonable, less explainable delegation policy decisions than the one that went to DLive. And notably, even if DLive were an open source project, everything that is happened could easily have happened just the same way because that has nothing to do with whether they decide to take their work to another blockchain.

Policy that would make no difference makes no difference, no matter what.