Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software • Hacker News Board

Re: Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

#61

Post by irahul » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 12:07 PM UTC

kaolinite wrote: post #46

irahul wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> " I'd argue Mono is intrinsically evil" > Could you explain why this is? I use Mono and I'm genuinely interested. From the op's profile: "I really don't like Microsoft much." Apparently not liking MS much is reason enough to dislike an open source project implementing an interesting runtime and languages, which provides options to use aforementioned runtime and languages without being married to MS.

I suspect the reason he dislikes it, as many seem to, is that it's potentially legally unstable as Microsoft own IP related to C# and .net. I don't know the specifics (I don't use Mono myself), but I have heard people talking about possible problems in future if Microsoft changes their mind about encouraging Mono.

> I suspect the reason he dislikes it, as many seem to, is that it's potentially legally unstable as Microsoft own IP related to C# and .net.

This has been on the horizon ever since Mono's inception. This is what wikipedia has to say:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_(software)#Mono_and_Micros...

On July 6, 2009, Microsoft announced that it was placing their ECMA 334 and ECMA 335 specifications under their Community Promise pledging that they would not assert their patents against anyone implementing, distributing, or using alternative implementations of .NET.[79] However, their position regarding the non-ECMA components like ASP.NET, ADO.NET, and Windows Forms (which are the bone of contention) remains unclarified.

There are concerns regarding MS community promise, and of course about the components which remain unclarified. If it ever goes to court, it will be a battle similar to Google vs Oracle over Java. MS might create trouble, but when that happens, that isn't going to be easy.

Even considering that, how is Mono intrinsically evil? When MS sues, hindsight will say Mono team was misguided and naive to trust MS, but that still doesn't make mono evil.

Re: Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

#62

Post by chris_wot » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 12:07 PM UTC

jasim wrote: post #47

bad_user wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to be aware that using childish clauses in licenses can have legal repercussions. This is not about "Free Software" or "Open Source" either, because that same clause can get you in trouble even if it comes in the EULA of a proprietary product. The article was itself childish, but then again, it's a personal blog, not some kind of official statement. > it discourages people from contributing True, but my p…

I'm not disagreeing with the message of caution. But it could have been said much better. > True, but my perspective is different - what discourages people from contributing are ego-driven testosterone-filled spoiled brats. Incidentally that's why we also have so few women contributing. Ego and Testosterone in the same sentence - that has to be bad! But it is a different conversation altogether.

Contrary to popular belief, neither ego nor testosterone are absent from women.

Re: Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

#63

Post by shlomme » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 12:07 PM UTC

jasim wrote: post #14

The article is in bad taste. The title even more. If you don't like Crockford's license you are at liberty to write that code yourself. Please don't call people who contribute a great deal to advancing computing (Free Software or not) names like 'harmful to Free Software'. Even if there is genuine concern in the license and its usage in Free Software, it should be raised by pointing to the code and the license, not b…

Note that the complaint is not about not being able to rewrite the code. It's done by a Debian maintainer of a piece of software that depends in weirdly-licensed code; and there are many of them. While sometimes Debian packages are modified to remove files that are not eligible for redistribution, in this case the maintainers would have to rewrite larger parts to make them DFSG-compatible.

This only leads to more fragmentation and bad relations between Debian and upstream.

Re: Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

#64

Post by andrewcooke » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 12:08 PM UTC

klausa wrote: post #45

>It’s fairly clear that the JSON.org license clause goes against both of these, making any piece of software using that license neither Open Source nor Free Software I'm sorry, is there some definition of Open Source that I'm not aware of?

wouldn't they be referring to http://opensource.org/osd ?

Re: Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

#65

Post by sixbrx » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 12:09 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #43

jasim wrote: post #14

The article is in bad taste. The title even more. If you don't like Crockford's license you are at liberty to write that code yourself. Please don't call people who contribute a great deal to advancing computing (Free Software or not) names like 'harmful to Free Software'. Even if there is genuine concern in the license and its usage in Free Software, it should be raised by pointing to the code and the license, not b…

People need to be aware that using childish clauses in licenses can have legal repercussions. This is not about "Free Software" or "Open Source" either, because that same clause can get you in trouble even if it comes in the EULA of a proprietary product. The article was itself childish, but then again, it's a personal blog, not some kind of official statement. > it discourages people from contributing True, but my p…

So I guess the projects led by developers that are kind and helpful to a fault, of which there are quite a few in my experience, must have all the women contributers funnelled to them. I haven't seen that that's the case so I'm not so sure about your theory.

Re: Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

#66

Post by chris_wot » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 12:09 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #57

chris_wot wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen, the clause is so ridiculously vague as to be unenforcable. However, there is one way of looking at it that might not be legally objectionable. If you consider evil to be contrary to the good functioning of a civil society, then you could say that any act of evil is against the laws if this society. In which case the clause is legally enforceable, but completely unnecessary as no contract can stipulate a party…

Listen, the clause is so ridiculously vague as to be unenforcable. You hope. If you consider evil to be contrary to the good functioning of a civil society, then you could say that any act of evil is against the laws if this society. In which case the clause is legally enforceable, but completely unnecessary as no contract can stipulate a party undertake an illegal act. Which countries laws are we dealing with here?…

You hope

Actually, I don't really care either way. If it becomes legally enforcable not to commit evil, I win. If it isn't legally enforcable, then I still win, only to a much lesser degree. By which I mean I lose through winning.

Which countries laws are we dealing with here? :P

e.g. I believe lots of US employee laws would be very illegal in EU.

You merely illustrate my point. Too vague to be enforcable.

Re: Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

#67

Post by rmc » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 12:10 PM UTC

raganwald wrote: post #34

Shouldn't this be, Why you should know what you're doing legally before you contribute code to free software? Or perhaps, The system works, notice how we avoided the mistake of including software with an eccentric and non-free license from being included in free software? It takes me back to the frenzy over VLC on iOS. People write code, we need to respect their choices with respect to how they license it, even if th…

the GPL is un-free

Now that's a contentous statement, depending on one's definition of "free" and "un-free". However the GPL, unlike this "no evil licence", is an FSF approved, and OSI approved, and DFSG approved licence. They aren't in the same category.

Re: Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

#68

Post by michaelt » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 12:11 PM UTC

jahewson wrote: post #20

andrewguenther wrote: post #8

Here is the quote the post refers to from "The JSON Saga": When I put the reference implementation onto the website, I needed to put a software license on it. I looked up all the licenses that are available, and there were a lot of them. I decided the one I liked the best was the MIT license, which was a notice that you would put on your source, and it would say: "you're allowed to use this for any purpose you want,…

It's sad that Crockford thinks that causing this kind of hassle to diligent users of his software is funny. Ha ha, stupid user, you took the legally binding joke which I inserted into a legally binding license seriously, hahah you sooo funny. Yeah, a real barrel of laughs. Never mind that licensing law is a lot less flexible than contract law, in which unreasonable terms are readily removed.

Software licensing is already a joke - he's just being honest about it.

Re: Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

#69

Post by pooriaazimi » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 12:12 PM UTC

Don't say "Free Software", please. Because you actually mean "FSF-compliant" license. Some people don't give the slightest damn what FSF or any other crazy institution has determined to be a "free" (as in thought/speech) software license. In my humble opinion, a true "free" software license is the kind of license that lets you do "whatever the fuck you want to do" with it - in other words, "public domain".

GPL (whatever the version might be), in my opinion, is not a true "free" license because it forbids you to, for example, re-publish the source without attribution or using them without being GPL-compliant or any number of other restrictions. BSD is much better, but still has some restrictions. Even WTFPL[1] is not "free" (as in speech/thought), because it requires you to change the "name" upon re-distribution.

So, yes; Douglas Crockford is harmful to "FSF"-kind of "free software", but I think GPL and BSD are also harmful to the more "idealistic" definition of "free software".

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

Re: Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

#70

Post by lucian1900 » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 12:13 PM UTC

fourstar wrote: post #30

andrewguenther wrote: post #8

Here is the quote the post refers to from "The JSON Saga": When I put the reference implementation onto the website, I needed to put a software license on it. I looked up all the licenses that are available, and there were a lot of them. I decided the one I liked the best was the MIT license, which was a notice that you would put on your source, and it would say: "you're allowed to use this for any purpose you want,…

Glad to see Crockford making jokes there. Unfortunately after leaving a comment on a recent picture update on his Google+ profile (in good humor), he banned me from his circles, unshared everything with me, and removed the comment. I still look up to him though.

I tend to do that to people I don't know. Seems perfectly reasonable.