Our developer and application communities have been asking for more clarity on our licensing models, and we are very happy to share our progress and some exciting news. Last September, we wrote about the licensing needs for truly peer-to-peer software. As part of that post, we said that it was time to develop a new type of license to protect people’s rights to their data, which we then called the “Human Commons License.” Since then, we have been working hard on Holochain, as well as this new licensing model, now called the “Cryptographic Autonomy License.”

We understand that there are lots of new licenses being proposed right now. The motivation behind those licenses is generally to protect a single company’s proprietary interest.

In contrast, we are creating the Cryptographic Autonomy License because we don’t believe that any existing license is written to match the structure of fully peer-to-peer cryptographic applications, which seek to uphold the interests of the users, like the ones that can be developed using the Holochain framework.

Creating a new license must be done with care and in consultation with both experts and the community. Thus, this post is the first of a number of blog posts that will lay out why we think a new license is necessary, how we propose it be structured, and how we intend to proceed throughout implementation.