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

[VanL]

Hi Nigel,

You are correct that the CAL does not mandate any particular functionality
or method of compliance. History has shown that mandating a particular
technical structure is unwise. Instead, the CAL simply describes what is
required and uses the standard tool of open source licensing - the denial
or termination of the license - to motivate compliance.

You can argue that the CAL may be difficult to comply with in some cases,
or that ot would not be well-suited to some types of applications. But
those are not marks against the CAL. Different licenses address different
needs.

Thanks,
Van


On Wed, Dec 11, 2019, 9:13 AM Nigel T <nigel.2048 at gmail.com> wrote:

> The bar is being moved here.  CAL does not require that the software be
> able to import any data to get back to a running state...or (according to
> Van) even need to export any data so a SQL dump is acceptable in meeting
> the CAL requirement.
>
> So the user's "ability to get back to the place they were" probably
> requires that they re-enter the data and re-doing any associations by hand
> anyway. The data doesn't even have to be in any kind of layout to
> facilitate re-entering the data.  Here you go...a SQL dump of your data,
> enjoy.  I could even just create a single PNG of all the data and meet CAL
> requirements.
>
> If the objective really is for the user to be able to get back to where
> they were with a clean copy of the system then CAL should specify that CAL
> software should support import/export round tripping of user data.
>
> In any case, the operation of the software is not dependent on the user's
> customer data being present or your software is broken.
>
> I take it you do not like the suggestion that the downstream software user
> is under no obligation to provide any customer data that the original code
> did not provide as export?
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2019 at 12:37 AM Henrik Ingo <henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 11 Dec 2019, 03:29 VanL, <van.lindberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> The use or operation of the software is not dependent on user’s customer
>>>> provided data being present...
>>>
>>>
>>> This is not really correct, if you think about it.
>>>
>>> I don't think it is debatable to say that some (most?) software works
>>> differently in the presence of particular data. The subroutines the run are
>>> different; the displayed interface may be different; the state of the
>>> software is *different.* Because the accumulated state is different, the
>>> actual functioning of the software, as experienced by the user, is
>>> different.
>>>
>>> I agree that the user has the ability to get back to the place where
>>> they were by re-entering the data and re-doing any associations made. But
>>> the latent potential for the software to work the same way is not the same
>>> as the software actually functioning the exact same way.
>>>
>>>
>> Taking this argument further, the user can also rewrite all the code from
>> scratch, and therefore all copyleft licenses (and open source) are
>> unnecessary in general.
>>
>> Henrik
>>
>>>
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