[License-review] For approval: The Cryptographic Autonomy License (Beta 2)

[Henrik Ingo]

Pam

On Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 2:10 AM Pamela Chestek <pamela at chesteklegal.com>
wrote:

> As a complete duffer in software, this provision is troublesome to me. It
> goes well beyond offering a service. This is the same example I used on the
> last review of this license, so forgive me for repeating it. Suppose I put
> up my homemade website and want a widget that displays my Twitter feed. I
> look at my options among the various addons and extensions and pick one
> that looks like it's just the ticket. Woe is me if I picked one under the
> CAL. Having the widget on my website is not a private use and so I have to
> make the source code available, plus provide notices and attribution on my
> website for the widget. I suspect anyone would be surprised that they had
> incurred such a burden.
>
> Still speaking entirely personally.
>
>
It's already been pointed out that the exact same questions arise with the
AGPL license. But I wanted to point out that your hypothetical really
highlights how it's simply not a realistic goal to say that a user must be
able to safely copy code from the internet without understanding licensing.
That is not the case for software in general, nor open source. A lot of
code on github is not under any open source license anyway, so just
cavalierly copying some widget code to your website is a bad idea. And
that's why at least in my university CS education we were trained not to do
that.

That said, OSI should not approve licenses with unexpected or hazardous
requirements on users. I should not be obligated to water your plants, for
example.

(If your widget is client side JavaScript then also GPL and LGPL will
require you to provide source.)

 henrik
-- 
henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi
+358-40-5697354        skype: henrik.ingo            irc: hingo
www.openlife.cc

My LinkedIn profile: http://fi.linkedin.com/pub/henrik-ingo/3/232/8a7
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