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Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

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

#81

Post by alexjarvis »

saraid216 wrote: post #19
jahewson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as "too literally" in a legally binding contract, which is intended to be used anywhere on the world. All it takes is one open-minded judge. Sure it's 99.9% subjective, but why take a chance? What happens if it's used by a company that openly labels itself as evil? Not so subjective anymore... Crockford's act of granting special licenses to companies who may have evil-doing clients is a strong i…

> The real problem with this stupid joke is that it requires a trip to court to invalidate it. I find myself strangely okay with the idea of requiring people to walk into a courtroom and admit that they intend to enact or permit evil.

I would also quite like to see this happen.

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

#82

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

masklinn wrote: post #11
jasonkester wrote: post #5

Seems like this could be avoided by simply approaching the author and offering to pay for a version of the software with the license you want. If I'm not mistaken, the author in question has in fact given companies in the past permission to use this particular library for "evil purposes". Most importantly though, one should refrain from making demands on people who are offering you things for free. If you like the co…

> Seems like this could be avoided by simply approaching the author and offering to pay for a version of the software with the license you want. or taking the JSON grammar and implementing it from scratch. It's not exactly complex, the most complex part is strings and even those are rather simple.

Someone should start an open source project called EvilJSON which reimplements it but flips the good and evil in the licence so you can't use it for good.

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

#83

Post by nicholassmith »

If you don't like his license, don't use it. Drop the packages out of the system, kill PHP and YUI and jQuery and anything else that's decided they're okay with the licensing specifying that it shouldn't be used for evil and taking a slight poke at how restrictive a non-restrictive license can be. In the end the morals survive but the platform suffers. Or approach him and ask him to relicense, or create a derivative or one of the other options.

Blog post reads more like the author has a specific problem with Crockford and is doing this in public to try make him seem foolish.

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

#84

Post by iSnow »

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.

Writing OpenSource software used to be a real of real amateurs, people who do it because they love to do that stuff and derive fun out of it. Now, it seems, the license has become the most important aspect in this.

IMHO, this is a most unfortunate development, sadly driven by license fundamentalists like Debian. It is high time that someone like Crockford throws a fistful of sand in those gears and causes butthurt. Maybe this will cause at least some people to start thinking again instead blindly following the perceived neccessities of some special OSS project.

And yes, if the Debian folk are this worried, it should be a matter of days to invent "GNU JSON (now with a proper LICENSE so we can kiss more enterprise ass)"

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

#85

Post by alexjarvis »

jahewson wrote: post #18
alexjarvis wrote: post #10

I think that this has probably been taken a little too literally. It would be interesting to get the original author’s opinion.. I agree completely with Sehe’s comment about the terms of the statement not being clearly defined and thus no judge could reasonably use it in court against any uses of the software. Good and Evil are subjective opinions to which each individual has their own beliefs.

There's no such thing as "too literally" in a legally binding contract, which is intended to be used anywhere on the world. All it takes is one open-minded judge. Sure it's 99.9% subjective, but why take a chance? What happens if it's used by a company that openly labels itself as evil? Not so subjective anymore... Crockford's act of granting special licenses to companies who may have evil-doing clients is a strong i…

I agree with you wholeheartedly, but you could argue that by granting it to some 'evil' clients, that he is invalidating his statement, proving that it is just a joke, and just laughing at everyone that asks for a special licence. Furthermore, has Douglas any intention to take someone to court over this? I don't know much about him, but I highly doubt it.

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

#86

Post by nicholassmith »

rbanffy wrote: post #80
nicholassmith wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of possible problems, but I think Microsoft regards it as a nice way to keep developers developing using their tools, similar to how Adobe takes a pretty hands off approach on piracy of Photoshop.

Exactly. The more people use Mono, the more valuable the .NET runtime, and Windows itself, becomes.

Pretty much, always a bit puzzled when people assume that Microsoft will throw the toys out of the pram at some stage. It's a net benefit for them if more people are using the language, rather than shifting to C or C++ and sticking with that instead.

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

#87

Post by rmc »

michaelt wrote: post #75
rmc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If FSF had the foresight to trademark Free Software™ and Open Source™ we wouldn't have this sort of confusion.

The OSI tried and failed to trademark "Open Source". It failed because it was too generic IIRC.

Trademark law isn't needed. There isn't really any disagreements over the terms "Free (as in freedom) Software" or "Open Source".

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

#88

Post by rmc »

chris_wot wrote: post #66
rmc wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Vague on an international stage, maybe. But a national court (which is the only thing relevant), it might not be considered vague.

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

#90

Post by WayneDB »

archangel_one wrote: post #55
andreasvc wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're painting a picture of a way out that doesn't exist for most people (reverse straw man?). When it's about a library on which a lot of software depends then the common non-programmer has had absolutely no choice about this and cannot re-implement either.

Right, but that's not the fault of the original author. He licensed his code a particular way, and everyone else has the choice to either use it or not. I don't like the attitude of blaming him simply because lots of other people came to depend on it without realising that it's less free than some of them might have liked.

Maybe we don't have to blame him for anything, but we can still have the opinion that he's a childish asshole.
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