Do they even see themselves how utterly ridiculous they are?

After skimming the article and spending far more time than I should have clicking around this thread[1], the problem appears to be related to these two sections of the license:

> 3.1. Permissions Granted
>
> Conditioned on compliance with section 4, and subject to the limitations of section 3.2, Licensor grants You the world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive permission to:
>
> a) Take any action with the Work that would infringe the non-patent intellectual property laws of any jurisdiction to which You are subject; and
>
> b) Take any action with the Work that would infringe any patent claims that Licensor can license or becomes able to license, to the extent that those claims are embodied in the Work as distributed by Licensor.
>
> 3.2. Limitations on Permissions Granted
> The following limitations apply to the permissions granted in section 3.1:
>
> a) Licensor does not grant any patent license for claims that are only infringed due to modification of the Work as provided by Licensor, or the combination of the Work as provided by Licensor, directly or indirectly, with any other component, including other software or hardware.
>
> b) Licensor does not grant any license to the trademarks, service marks, or logos of Licensor, except to the extent necessary to comply with the attribution conditions in section 4.1 of this License.
>
> [...]
>
> 4.2. Maintain User Autonomy
> In addition to providing each Recipient the opportunity to have Access to the Source Code, You cannot use the permissions given under this License to interfere with a Recipient’s ability to fully use an independent copy of the Work generated from the Source Code You provide with the Recipient’s own User Data.
>
> “User Data” means any data that is an input to or an output from the Work, where the presence of the data is necessary for substantially identical use of the Work in an equivalent context chosen by the Recipient, and where the Recipient has an existing ownership interest, an existing right to possess, or where the data has been generated by, for, or has been assigned to the Recipient.
>
> 4.2.1. No Withholding User Data
> Throughout any period in which You exercise any of the permissions granted to You under this License, You must also provide to any Recipient to whom you provide services via the Work, a no-charge copy, provided in a commonly used electronic form, of the Recipient’s User Data in your possession, to the extent that such User Data is available to You for use in conjunction with the Work.

Note also that "Recipient" is defined in a way that is similar to the requirements of the AGPL (i.e. it includes people who interact with the software over a network).

In English:

* The CAL license is both a copyright license and a patent license. So we need to analyze it like a patent license, and not just like a copyright license.
* If you allow an end user to interact with CAL-licensed software in some way that generates data, you must allow the end user to obtain a copy of their data, in a format that can be directly used by the software, and you must not modify the software in such a way that the user can't actually run it on their own private copy of their data.

Bruce's argument, as far as I can follow it, appears to be that the people who made CAL intend to use software patents to enforce the data availability provision as applied to their particular use case. In other words, they are not merely requiring that software based on the CAL-licensed code comply with this data availability rule, but are instead attempting to impose this requirement on all software that interacts with their (decentralized?) system, regardless of where the code came from. Perens also argues that this could be much more straightforwardly accomplished by simply requiring participants in this system to sign a contract relating to user data.

I'm not thrilled with the use of software patents for this use case. But I'm also not entirely convinced that this is a problem specific to CAL. This looks a lot more like a "software patents are evil" problem than a "CAL is not OSD-compliant" problem, at least from where I sit. Other participants in the thread pointed out that most other FOSS licenses (which mention patents at all) have similar "we are only licensing the patents that would otherwise be infringed by verbatim distribution" clauses, so it is rather difficult to argue that CAL violates the OSD on that basis, without then concluding that many long-accepted licenses also violate the OSD.

[1]: https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lis...