Eric S. Raymond, one of the founders of the OSI (Open Source Initiative), who stood at the origins of the open source movement, that he was denied access to the OSI mailing lists where he revise 5 and 6 points related to the prohibition of discrimination, and also criticized attempts to limit unethical behavior at the level of licenses and the imposition of ideas . Already a few months at OSI related to attempts to include a license (Cryptographic Autonomy License) to the number of open licenses approved by OSI. In January
due to CAL disputes from OSI Bruce Perens, who, along with Eric Raymond, developed the definition of Open Source and created the OSI organization.
According to Raymond, the OSI organization has reached a level of bureaucratization corresponding to the third proposed by the writer βThe behavior of any bureaucratic organization is best understood by assuming that it is controlled by a conspiracy of its enemies.β Raymond has been removed from mailing lists for being too pushy against a different interpretation of the fundamental principles that prohibit the infringement of the rights of certain groups and discrimination in the field of application in the license.
According to Raymond, an attempt is now being made to redefine the cultural foundations of open source. Instead of the principles of meritocracy and the βshow me the codeβ approach, a new model of behavior is being imposed, according to which no one should feel uncomfortable. The effect of such actions is to reduce the prestige and autonomy of people who do work and write code in favor of self-styled guardians of noble manners (, focus on the manner in which the arguments are presented, rather than the arguments themselves).
Such work, even if it is done with good intentions, disrupts the processes of self-correcting behavior in the community and can very easily turn into censorship of other views. "Codes of conduct", designed to regulate even non-project activity of participants, are becoming more widespread and often become a tool for suppressing alternative points of view and other opinions.
Regarding ethical restrictions in licenses and a different look at points 5 and 6 of the definition of an open license, recently more and more projects have expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that cloud providers create derivative commercial products and resell open frameworks and DBMS as cloud services, but do not take part in the life of the community and do not help in development. The consequence is the introduction of licenses that impose restrictions on the scope of use. Similar licenses have been adopted in recent years in projects such as , , , ΠΈ .
License could be a precedent (Cryptographic Autonomy License), which is close to being classified by OSI as open. In this license, the introduction of new restrictions is due to the desire to prevent companies from controlling user data and to oblige application developers to store encryption keys only on end-user systems. The noted requirements can be considered as discrimination against application developers who store keys on a centralized server.
Recall that the CAL license to the category of copyleft licenses and by order of the project specifically for additional protection of user data in distributed P2P applications. Holochain is developing a hashchain-based platform for building cryptographically verified distributed applications and, with a new license, is trying to ensure that any application based on Holochain is trustworthy and autonomous. In addition to requiring all derivative works to be distributed under the same terms, the license grants the right to public performance only while maintaining the confidentiality and autonomy of each individual user's private cryptographic keys.
CAL is conceptually different from other licenses, as it covers not only the code, but also the processed data. According to the CAL, if the confidentiality of the user's key is compromised (for example, the keys are stored on a centralized server), then ownership of the data is violated and control over the application's own copies is lost. In practice, this feature of the license allows key manipulation only on the end user side, without storing them on centralized servers. For example, a CAL license will not allow a company to create its own corporate P2P chat based on Holochain, in which employee keys are placed on a common storage controlled by the company, which does not exclude the possibility of reading correspondence.
Note: currently , the site of the OSI (Open Source Initiative), which checks licenses for compliance with Open Source criteria, is not available in the Russian Federation due to Roskomnadzor (IP 159.65.34.8 is included in the old blocking list of cloud services that were used in Telegram). For a similar reason of blocking 68 resources related to open source development, including blogs.apache.org, git.openwrt.org, mozilla.cloudflare-dns.com, bugs.php.net, bugs.python.org, and more.
Source: opennet.ru