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openca / libpki

Easy-to-use high-level library for PKI-enabled applications
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Please make LibPKI free software again #86

Open dmilewskiwph opened 7 months ago

dmilewskiwph commented 7 months ago

Licensing changes started with 2d29a8f made LibPKI nonfree and not even open source, which it claims to be in COPYING. For rationale please read "Why programs must not limit the freedom to run them."

opencrypto commented 7 months ago

Thank you for your comment, I really do appreciate the need to provide free software for people to use it, learn from it, and contribute back to the society. The changes we made to the license still allow for that.

However, unfortunately, we live in a difficult period when the freedom of people is being disrupted by ignorant (in the literal sense of the word) leaders and supporting countries. Although we have no way to convince people to sit down and talk instead of acting like monkeys, we could not just sit and watch. Specifically, we decided that the work of our community should not be available to the people that are causing lots of harm to others, disrespecting any international law and agreements, and clashing with our ethics.

May I ask you few questions for us to continue a constructive discussion:

Please let me know so I can understand better your position. Also, we are very open to adjusting the license agreement from this point of view. If you have any suggestion for changes, please let us know what the change is and why you are requesting the change.

Thank you again for this submission, it is a very important topic that we want to be sure we get right it for everybody.

dmilewskiwph commented 6 months ago

I'm from Poland, not Russia, so I'm not directly affected by the change of license other than that I strongly prefer to use free software whenever possible. I'm sad to say, but restrictions on use make LibPKI merely source available. For now I'm using the version from before the change. I'd like for the license to be changed back to the original one or to any other free software license, though because of the uniqueness of LibPKI I'd love to see GNU GPL v3 or later being used.

I appreciate your ethical concerns, but I don't think making LibPKI nonfree would stop people associated with Russia in any way. If they don't care about human rights, they won't care about copyright either. But the change makes it hard for people who want to use free software to use LibPKI, for example, prohibiting its inclusion in Debian's main repository. I'm a vegetarian and I believe killing animals just to eat them is unethical too, but I don't think putting a restriction to prohibit it in a software license would do more than annoy the users.