RE: Downvote me if you can't
There is a link to the licence file in the article. Modifying the code in any way to fork steem and create a new blockchain is impossible. Just read it I guess.
About the distribution, it's not about what you put in it. The mining and overall distribution systems of any crypto is here for the purpose of getting users in. If you ask users to deposit money to get coins, it's a scam. Satoshi had the idea of mining because he thought anyone would be able to trade computational time for coins, from any personal computer. ASICs destroyed that system. If you want a crypto to be succesful, the distribution needs to be fair, because that's what makes adoption possible.
Also you need to consider the fact that maybe you are part of the successful steem users, not many people had the same luck than you. Also you should count whatever you paid to get to amsterdam. Oh and also you should count all the time you have put into it. But somehow that makes the calculation harder and less positive regarding steem, and that's now how you get upvotes around here, right ?
Why do you want steemit to allow their code to be forked without approval?
The licence is a protection for everyone who invested in steem.
Steem is far from perfect. As you mentionned there is some distribution issues, I wrote a lenghty post about this here https://steemit.com/steemit-ideas/@snowflake/what-if-i-told-you-i-ve-uncovered-a-top-secret-community-this-community-is-so-secretive-that-if-you-want-to-work-your-way-up-its
If someone can fork steem and solve these issues, then the fork will stand a very high chance of being more succesfull than steem and everyone's investment will become worthless.
I was really surprised by the move made by the founders to support golos and allow them to fork, if you want to shake investors's confidence there is no better way to do it than that. And merely for a language barrier issue, that's the part that got me concerned.
Indeed Steem is far from perfect, but forbidding other devs to use it as a base for future project, just makes the growth slower. Anything a fork implements would easily be implemented on steem too, that's the nature of open source. The goal is not to profit, it's to achieve this 'perfection' status and make your grandma use a decentralized social network instead of facebook.
If another dev team manages to improve it faster than Steem, without the funds SteemIt corp has, without the experience on the code base, and without the active users Steem has, then it means they are really good, or that Steem deserves to fail. Even in this case, I don't think the users/investors would lose too much. They would be aware of these forks because of steem and will likely be in the first people to invest in the new coin.
As mentioned in the comments of your article, the network needs protection against sybil attacks. Let B = S1 + S2 be the SP of 3 accounts. The voting power combined of the 2 small accounts needs to be equal or lower to the voting power of the big one. => VP(B) >= VP(S1) + VP(S2)
It will never happen, because somebody could just clone it and create a version of steem with no ninja mine.
There is some truth in what you say. The way I see it though is that steem is a unique community project and the fact that it is licensed protected means all the brain power from devs all over the world will come to steemit, this to me is powerful. The fact that everyone contribute for the betterment of the same platform. Imagine what bitcoin would be if all the altcoins devs were contributing to bitcoin only..
I have often expressed my disagreement with building hundreds of different app based on the steem blockchain for the same reasons I've just mentionned. If all these people would work on the same project that project would have higher chances of making it big than all the other 100 combined. This is why I was really excited by the busy announcement, because they are going to allow these apps to be integrated within the same site, this is huge for both busy and the apps developers. When people work isolated in their corner their lower their chances of being successfull, why do you think companies create partnership with each other ? This is particularly true for social media sites which are very difficult to bootstrap into mainstream nowadays.
Yes sybil attacks are a real problem. The day we find a way to solve proof of unique individual we are going to solve many many issue, not just in steem. The problems of power concentration/distribution could be solve though, maybe by using outside parameters that are not in the blockchain, such as reputation, points, etc..in order to create a voting power score that isn't just based on how much money you have.
I should read all that properly sometime. I never have bothered to but what i read distinctly said the tokens names were ... trademarked? I figured the code was under some standard open source licence.
Why would someone expect to get something out without putting something in? Have you considerered what is the profit and loss ledger for them after 90% drop in steem value? Have you watched the estimated account value? Mine has been stuck at 350 or so since late september, despite some 200 of liquid payouts during that time.
If you think you are being ripped off stop selling your time to it...