[License-review] For approval: The Cryptographic Autonomy License (Beta 4)

[Bruce Perens]

On Fri, Dec 6, 2019, 9:33 PM VanL <van.lindberg at gmail.com> wrote:

> But as has been pointed out by several people, the scenario you describe
> could happen with any license.
>

Certainly any party can assert a patent, but as we have observed, Open
Source projects don't assert patents against each other. I don't know if
even one instance.

The difference in this case is that a fundamental feature of the  network
breaks if you allow interoperable software under another Open Source
license on the network. Because that network node operator is not bound by
any anti-sequestration terms. So as far as I can tell, you have to assert
your patents, you can't tolerate having that operator continue.

There's a pretty big difference between could sue, but nobody does it
because of the damage it would cause, and must sue because the network
fails and/or the business breaks if you don't.

Now this all might be moot. There was a company called Synform that tried
to do this years ago, got $20 Million funding and $500k exit. And there's
at least one today: Storj.io and Tardigrade.io. I am not invested in any of
these, we don't do blockchain and will not be getting into this market. But
what this makes me think is that this will end up being another license
that nobody uses, like the badgeware one which caused tons of dispute and
ended up with zero community acceptance.

    Thanks

    Bruce

>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/attachments/20191207/d94ad3a7/attachment.html>