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

[Eric Schultz]

Consistent with my previous comments, I say "MoreDiscussionNeeded". I don't
think we fully understand how this applies in some of the situations I
previously mentioned and how it interacts with the principles behind FOSS
and its effect on users. Sadly, the nature of this process doesn't really
allow a proper nuanced exploration necessary for a decision of this
magnitude and I don't think that discussion is going to happen on this list.

That said, given the process we have and the discussion so far, I lean
slightly towards this license being OSD compliant (and FSD compliant for
that matter). But I'm also not going to be shocked if there's some
unexpected consequences from this license.

Eric

On Fri, Feb 7, 2020, 11:20 AM Josh Berkus <josh at berkus.org> wrote:

>
> > Having reviewed the latest draft, "Pass" from me. I have lingering
> > concerns over this license, and the potential for abuse by Holochain or
> > other unknown licensors, based partly on the earlier drafting history,
> > some of Van's earlier comments on those drafts, and general suspicion of
> > new copyleft licenses advanced specifically by narrow commercial
> > interests. However I don't think those concerns are sufficiently
> > grounded in the current license text such that I would recommend
> > rejection or more protracted discussion. If this license is approved, I
> > would not recommend that anyone use it. But on its face, the license,
> > including the core interesting User Data requirement feature, seem to me
> > consistent with the spirit of the OSD and software freedom.
>
> Well, let's thought-experiment this onto a non-crypto project to see how
> it maps.  Imagine that I'm Tobias, lead maintainer of Pretalx conference
> software, and owner of pretalx.com hosting service.  What I want out of
> the license is:
>
> * reassurance for my customers that I won't "lock up" their data;
> * a guarantee that if someone launches a competeing pretalx hosting
> service, they can't lock up customer data preventing migration either
> * maximizing sharing of any improvements to the code
>
> Does the CAL do this?
>
>
> --
> Josh Berkus
>
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