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RE: Brainstorming Gridcoinstats Ideas Thread [25 SBD in Bounty]
As a second suggestion, I would like to see the block explorer be open source so other people could build off of it. I would be particularly interested in setting up my own so I could get a SQL database of all the good stuff locked inside the coin's blockchain.
Considering I've spent hundreds of hours with making an explorer from the ground up with quite the lack of documentation on many accounts, there will be no open-sourcing of the explorer.
Nice idea though, can't blame one for trying ;)
PS: There might (no timeframe) be an expansion of the API access in the future. With the gridcoin.asia explorer down and out of sync as well sometimes, there are no real good APIs for the wallet online. I've been thinking about it, but yet not decided how to do it.
But, I mean, isn't that kind of the point? We had Katiee's thing now GridCoin Asia having problems every now and then and I'm pretty sure there used to be another block explorer at some point too. If any of this had been open sourced - even just the base of it - others (with greater skill than I) could be contributing so not everyone has to from scratch again and more advanced features could be added. There is no reason why you cannot keep running ads and have more advanced features that keeps traffic coming to your site and gives you the opportunity to monetize it while their is still a base for people to share and work off of.
Sepulcher's asia explorer, gridresearchcorp explorer and katiee's pool/calculators should be open sourced because they are in need for additional development. gridcoinstats is functioning well and has been reliable.
I think it'd be a great idea for anyone who isn't interested in open sourcing their projects to create guides or light tutorials (hints) on how users could replicate some of the gridcoin specific functionality which could compliment some of the open source block explorer toolkits available right now.
However, if 10 clones were to pop up then the traffic to gridcoinstats would decrease and ad revenue would decrease. Any proposal for open sourcing a commercial platform should come with a fat bounty which would replace several years future earnings.
I don't think that's the only reason for open sourcing. Look at Google's Chromium - that's open source because it's a basic part of creating standards.
I think you're overestimating how easy it would be for clones to overtake you
a) only make the basics available, not your advanced features;
d) people have to then find out about the clones
c) you have first mover advantage and a captured audience. Look at Google, how many dozens of clones have been created using Chromium; same could be said with FireFox's open source base. The base still remain with the bigger players.
d) You have a faucet - don't open source that- keep your audience captured.
I do understand your wish for this, but let me point out...
I'm not creating a standard. I'm creating a service. I have no intention of generating a standard for something as I'm not the maker of such standard.
The basics are pretty basics for anyone to create by their own. I see no need in open-sourcing a project that is just a small script.
You're really overselling this. Google is big, not because they have open-sourced Chromium, but because they do so much. Some open-sourced projects are not going to tip them over. They have big moneybag companies behind them, and if the company starts to lose money these projects are the first to be dropped by them. This is one project, a personal and my biggest project thus far. I have no intention to stop expanding it and support it with more features, but it takes time, effort and money from my part.
Besides, more isn't merrier. Can't see how a dozen more clones could make it better. Either it should be all, or nothing. Why release an open-source project that is just a fraction of what we have? It would result in confusion because there will be many clones running with various degrees of services or lack of service.
Sorry, I will not Open-Source it, end of story
Clearly it's not, otherwise there would be others out there already. I've asked multiple times over the last two months for anything that has the ability to let me know how to migrate some of the blockchain to SQL so I can have some fun exploring it. You know how many takers there have been on providing advice? One; 1! That one person said go find an open source block-chain explorer. I've spent hours trying to figure out how to port stuff over from other blockchains without success; 1) because I'm not a techie and 2) because things are often written with Linux instructions so it's a challenge to figure out how to move it over to WAMP.
And therein lives the challenge: people like you are very talented, and basic building blocks help those that are looking to learn more to be able to start out. It's rather unfortunate that more people don't see it that way. I'm very strong in SQL and structured data; getting something from JSON or whatever the hell our blockchain is stored in - that's a completely different battle. I suspect there are many people like that that have strong suits in certain places too and would benefit greatly from examples that are able to help them. The same challenge exist with GRC in general right now when it comes to trying to modify the UI with QT maker, etc.. So unfortunate...
@cm-steem (customminer) has made some open-source scripts that you can check out surrounding scraping the Gridcoin wallet.
https://github.com/grctest/GRC-Haskell
Got Choco NuGet, Jq, and Haskell installed. Cloned the repo. And trying to follow the instructions, but running into various compiling errors - just like GRC/Qt .
I'll post to the GitHub if I don't figure out what dependences are required because I think that's it.
Thank you for the suggestion.
I think that a separate open-source blockchain explorer project would be a good idea instead of gridcoinstats fully open-sourcing itself, after all it's @sc-steemit's business.
It's possible that with some uplifting of the gridcoin codebase we could simply use: https://insight.is/
No up-voting of the idea, though. Boo! Come on, you know you want to support it. What are we but not dreamers here in the GRC community.
What's that? Downvote you say? :P