Post #1019025

2026-04-03 13:27 UTC

I&#39;ve been looking a bit at #reticulum. The references implementation is in Python, and the developer has given it a custom licence that is essentially public domain, except banning use for AI or for harming humans. They have a lovely manifesto/rant thing where they explain their reasons: https://reticulum.network/manual/zen.html#ethics-of-the-tool Now this sort of license makes it not officially meet the definition of open source, which puts a lot of people out. Personally I think that we&#39;ve seen Open Source software co-opted by massive corporations in order to cause harm one time too many, and we need to have stronger values than that. Still, I understand that a lot of downstream open source projects need to be able to get grant funding and thus need official open source licenses and so forth, so I don&#39;t expect reticulum implementations to really use this license. As primarily a rust developer now, I&#39;m likely to use to rust implementation which has been developed by community members to the same spec. So, let&#39;s go over and look at that. https://github.com/BeechatNetworkSystemsLtd/Reticulum-rs It&#39;s MIT license, fair enough, no big surprise. I&#39;m sure we all care about ethical software but we need flexible licenses to build software for the reality of the economy we live in, yada yada yada. Except that I looked up &quot;Beechat Network Systems&quot;. They build mesh network systems for &quot;tactical teams, autonomous systems and sovereign communication&quot; with lots of pictures of jackbooted thugs in case it isn&#39;t clear that this is for military use. 🤮 I&#39;m so disheartened. This is why we can&#39;t have nice things in open source.

Replies (4)

@goblin@adlsolarpunk.net 2026-04-03 13:41

@jadehopepunk could the protocol spec itself fall under the Reticulum License? Making it so any Reticulum implementation would have to use said same license? edit: MIT allows re-licensing if you wanted to fork, understand ur frustrations though!

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@circfruit@fosstodon.org 2026-04-03 16:12

@jadehopepunk to be honest, as we’ve seen recently, there is not really a legal order in the world, so licensing is a very small concern 😄 If someone want to use it agains what the author had defined, I doubt the author has the resources to fight legal battles e.g. against a government which would use it for military purposes.

Open ##1314128
@lew@freeradical.zone 2026-04-03 20:00

@jadehopepunk https://codeberg.org/Lew_Palm/leviculum will go public in some weeks. Full Reticulum clone, but more features and embedded, AGPL-3.0

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@temporary@corteximplant.com 2026-04-04 08:26

@jadehopepunk what are the odds, I went down the same chain of thoughts yesterday as well while trying to read through the reticulum materials. The original author has made it clear that he wanted the license to protect the actual implementation not to be used for these purposes, but wanted the general idea and specs for reticulum to be free for any purpose which made no sense for me given how strong his statements felt on the matter. Anyway beechat feels extremely sketchy as they tried to create a first look of a privacy-first group working to empower the similar-minded people, while they have only 3 products on their page (with a soldier in uniform as the background image) and all of the products are for tactical use, priced in the thousands of euros, clearly targeting to scalp military procurements (coming from our taxes btw).

Open ##1314141