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

[VanL]

Replying generally to both Bradley and Richard:

To my knowledge, there are no plans for Holo to use the CAL to facilitate a
dual-license business model, or to particularly concentrate advantage
vis-a-vis rivals.

As I have stated a number of times, my client's long-term business model is
to provide business-fulfillment services on top of a free software platform
- think "Stripe," or "Fulfillment by Amazon," but for digital goods in a
distributed network. My client believes that a strong copyleft license,
including the provisions for protection of users, is a necessary step for
many people to feel trust in a distributed and decentralized
compute/storage/services system. Thus Holo is putting user freedoms first,
accepting the same restrictions that would apply to other operators, ahead
of its own short-term ability to commercially license Holochain.

My client does intend to have some non-open source applications that ride
on top of Holochain, but no special rules or access is planned. Instead,
the libraries and APIs that allow Holo's proprietary/revenue generating
capabilities will be subject to the Combined Works Exception built into the
CAL. This is so that Holo builds is consistent with the license *and*
sufficient for other parties to have enough access to build
differently-licensed applications that can run on top of the Holochain
framework.

Finally, it is to be expected that any license that isn't a legacy license
will start from a small base. There have been inbound expressions of
interest in using the CAL - including some on *this list* - pending OSI
approval. So it is not correct to say that Holo is the only interested
party at this point, even if we do have enough of an interest to spend 1 yr
and counting, plus legal fees, to try to do this the "right" way. Is one
takeaway here that people should start by ignoring the OSI process and just
start using the license?

Thanks,
Van
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