Eric S Raymond, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative, which was at the forefront of the open source software movement, said he was denied access to the organization's mailing lists because tried to resist revision of criteria 5 and 6.
These criterias are related to the prohibition of discrimination, also criticized attempts to limit unethical behavior at the license level and impose ideas of social justice. For several months now, the Open Source Initiative has been discussing attempts to enable CAL (Cryptographic Autonomy License) is among the approved open licenses.
In January, Bruce Perens, who, together with Eric Raymond, developed the definition of Open Source and created the Open Source Initiative, left the organization due to disagreements from CAL about OSI.
CAL (Cryptographic Autonomy License) belongs to the category of copyleft license and was developed at the request of the Holochain project specifically for additional protection of user data in distributed P2P applications.
Holochain is developing a hashchain-based platform to create cryptographically verified distributed applications, and with a new license it is trying to ensure that any Holochain-based application is reliable and autonomous.
In addition to the requirement to distribute all derivative works under the same conditions, the license grants the right to public performance (public performance) only while maintaining the confidentiality and autonomy of the private cryptographic keys of each individual user.
Conceptually, CAL is not like other licenses, as it covers not only the code, but also the processed data.
According to the CAL, if the confidentiality of the user password is violated (for example, the keys are stored in a centralized server), data ownership rights are also violated and control over their own data is lost copies of the application.
According to Raymond, the Open Source Initiative has reached a level of bureaucracy which complies with the third policy law proposed by writer Robert Conquest:
"The behavior of any bureaucratic organization is best understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret conspiracy of its enemies." Raymond was removed from the mailing lists because he was too persistent in opposing a different interpretation of the fundamental principles that prohibit the license from infringing the rights of certain groups and discrimination in the field of application.
According to Raymond, an attempt is currently being made to review the cultural foundations open source software.
The effect of such actions is a decrease in the prestige and autonomy of people who work and write code, in favor of the self-proclaimed guardians of noble manners (pitch police, focus on the way the arguments are presented, rather than the arguments themselves).
Regarding the restrictions Ethics in Licensing and a Different Opinion on points 5 and 6 to determine an open license, more and more projects have recently expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that cloud providers create derivative commercial products and resell open frameworks and DBMS in the form of cloud services, but they do not participate in community life and do not help in development.
The consequence is the introduction of licenses that impose a restriction on the scope of use. Similar licenses have been adopted in recent years in projects such as ElasticSearch, Redis, MongoDB, Timescale, and CockroachDB.
A precedent could be a CAL, which is close to being considered an OSI organization open. In this license, the introduction of new restrictions is due to the desire to prevent companies from controlling user data and to require application developers to store encryption keys only on end-user systems.
The stated requirements can be considered discrimination of application developers storing keys on a centralized server.