[License-review] Submission for review of Accountable Resolver License

[Pamela Chestek]

Can you describe what changes you've made in sections 1 and 4 from the 
CAL license? It looks significantly different right at the start - The 
heading of Section 1 of the CAL is "Purpose" but yours is "Definitions."

 From the outset your "Definitions" have at least one problematic 
section, which is that it states "1.1.2 Licensor Portable Data 
Corporation, operating as JLINC Labs, is the licensor of the Work and 
provides this Accountable Resolver License under the terms set out 
below." The approval guidelines for licenses 
<https://opensource.org/licenses/review-process> state one requirement 
is "The license must be reusable, meaning that it can be used by any 
licensor without changing the terms or having the terms achieve a 
different result for a different licensor." Hard coding an entity name 
in means that the license is not usable by anyone else. It also 
effectively prevents anyone else from using this license even for 
modifications to your software - that is, if someone modifies the code 
they are the licensor of their modifications, but the license says that 
JLINC is the licensor, so they cannot use this license for their 
modifications. They could use a Compatible Open Source License for their 
contributions, but then you are creating a license compliance nightmare 
for anyone using the software.

I have not reviewed the license beyond Section 1 because of this flaw 
and because I would like to have more background on your changes from 
the CAL before diving in.

Pam

Pamela S. Chestek
Chestek Legal
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El Dorado Hills, CA 95762
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pamela at chesteklegal
www.chesteklegal.com


On 10/21/2024 1:39 PM, Victor Grey via License-review wrote:
> To the OSI community, this is a request for approval for a new special-purpose open source license, as attached. The license is intended for software that provides registration and resolution services for Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs -https://w3c.github.io/did-core/). Such software may be used as a standalone service or incorporated into any other software to provide DID resolution services for any purpose, conditioned on it not being used to violate the privacy rights of end users of the service.
>
> It is based on the Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL-1.0) and is identical to CAL-1.0 with the exceptions of section 1 and portions of section 4.
>
> * We believe and affirm that the license complies with the Open Source Definition, including specifically that it meets OSD 3, 5, 6 and 9.
>
> * The license is currently being used in a private beta of a Federated ID service offered by JLINC Labs, and is already planned to be incorporated in several other businesses, to become public this year or early next year.
>
> * The license steward and submitter is Victor Grey, on behalf of the Portable Data Corporation DBA JLINC Labs, reachable atvictor at jlinc.com.
>
> * The license shall be known as the Accountable Resolver License version 1.0.
>
> * There are no unique identifiers by other projects or proposed tags.
>
> * We believe it fills a gap in necessary privacy requirements for these types of services that we have found in no other license.
>
> * As stated above, it is based on CAL-1.0.
>
> * It has not been through any other legal review by us.
>
> Many thanks for your attention,
> Victor Grey
>
>
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