Etherisc, a decentralized insurance protocol to collectively build insurance, announced today that it will soon open-source their Generic Insurance Framework (GIF), which is one of the core elements of its protocol.
GIF is a combined codebase which includes smart contracts and utility services. Product builders should be able to use this codebase to create full-featured insurance DApps. The basic idea behind the GIF is to abstract the generic parts which are shared across many different insurance applications, and leave only the product-specific parts like risk model, pricing, and payout configuration to be adjusted.
Starting this week, the Etherisc team will start to release the source code of the GIF. The first part has already been published on GitHub.
Etherisc further confirmed that they will soon deploy an instance of the GIF on testnet.
Apache 2.0 License Summary
The GIF is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. Apache 2.0 is a widely used license in the open-source community and approved by the Open Source Initiative. It is a permissive license that allows users to integrate the code into proprietary products. Rather than other “copyleft” licenses (such as the GPL), Apache 2.0 enables distribution of the code under different licenses.
Etherisc has chosen Apache 2.0 because it doesn’t want to limit the usage of the GIF source code and hinder or slow down commercial adoption of the framework.
For product builders, this choice means that they can freely use, modify, distribute, and sell software built on top of the GIF without worrying about the purpose of their products: personal, internal or commercial. They can redistribute the GIF but they must include a copy of the license and provide modification notes to all the files that they’ve changed.
Product builders can release modified or derived products under other licenses but all the unmodified parts of the GIF must retain the Apache 2.0 license. The modified version cannot be named in a way that implies the product is approved or created by Etherisc.
