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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

#101

Post by markokocic »

scott_w wrote: post #92
jasim wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree to this premise. Yes, it could be an issue - but Douglas Crockford is not morally obligated to worry about it. His code, his license. When you use it, you accept the risks that come with it. The post could have made a sane argument that the license is ambiguous and should be avoided in Free Software. But it focused on the author and made unjustifiable personal remarks. Not cool. The author also seem…

""" The author also seem to forget that there are advocates of the MIT license who would never use GPL software because of its viral nature. Does that mean Richard Stallman is 'harmful to software'? Criticize the license, but don't name-call the author who has made major positive contributions to the field. """ There is a large difference here: * The GPL is pushing an agenda in their licence, and attempts to clearly…

You can also say that GPL is pushing an agenda, while Crockford is standing up to his high moral principles. If you don't agree with it, just don't use it.

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

#102

Post by josephlord »

jballanc wrote: post #77
skreech wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you see it as a market, this is a typical market failure (externality and / or information assymmetry). Since the author has chosen a non-standard license, I doubt government regulation would help (unless that regulation outlawed non-standard FLOSS licenses). Probably would be better to reduce the information assymmetry. Maybe Github could have warning notifications for custom licenses, for example?

I've always considered the one thing that Google Code has over Github is the mandatory selection of a standard license when creating a publicly visible project. Also, to the point of regulation, the government is by no means the only vector by which it can be delivered. I think if you look through history, some of the most successful regulatory regimes have been separated from the traditional civil government.

Is there even actually a default license for public projects? I couldn't find anything except that if you have a public project you permit people to fork it.

Mandating a license (any license) but perhaps offering a selection to be automatically included would be a really good idea.

I wonder if you could actually put a license that gave permission to fork/clone but not actually to run/distribute outside github or otherwise use the code or derivatives thereof. I've not tried and wouldn't try to go against the spirit of Github in that way but it seems as if it might be permissible.

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

#103

Post by lmm »

irahul wrote: post #35
lmm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a license that's misleadingly almost-free. It's like the old 4-term BSD license with the "obnoxious advertising clause".

> It's a license that's misleadingly almost-free. Like the GPL is misleadingly almost free? As in it's free but if you release software which uses GPL software, it is under GPL? I am not arguing about the meaning of free, I am arguing against your "it's a license that's misleadingly almost free". Just like GPL's terms doesn't make it non-free, "don't use it for evil" doesn't make it non-free. EDIT: I see people argui…

On the terminology side: language is about communication, and there is a broad consensus on the meaning of "free" in terms of free software, exemplarized by the FSF's defnition, the OSI open source definition, and the DFSG. None of these definitions is identical to the others, and no doubt there are edge cases that would fall under one but not another, but neither the GPL nor Crockford's license is one of them; under this consensus meaning of "free" (which you claim not to be arguing about), the GPL is a free license and Crockford's is not.

On the practical side: the GPL is established and popular enough that you should know what you're getting yourself in for with GPL code. In theory I can imagine someone unfamiliar with the free software movement hearing that a piece of GPL code was "free" and assuming that meant they could use it in their closed products, but in practice when people talk about "free" software they tend to either mean the free software definition, or "freeware" (i.e. binaries which can be downloaded without charge) - which generally doesn't permit modification and redistribution. So I don't think this is a practical concern.

By contrast Crockford's license is not popular or established. Worse, it looks exceedingly similar to a popular, established license - the MIT license - which is free (in the free software sense). So it's very possible to accidentally download a Crockford-licensed piece of code, thinking that you can use it in a free software project, when in fact the license does not grant all the rights you would need to do this - as is demonstrated by the fact that the author of this post did exactly that.

Crockford is free to distribute his code under whatever license he likes, but using a license that looks very much like the MIT license but grants you a much smaller set of rights (a set which puts it on the other side of a line that, while in many ways arbitrary, is of great practical relevance when it comes reusing code in the wider internet community) is not nice.

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

#104

Post by TeMPOraL »

WayneDB wrote: post #90
archangel_one wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But why? I personally think that his joke was, in fact, funny.

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

#107

Post by tptacek »

To sum this story up: a programmer wrote a small piece of software that other people want to use and gave it away for free, with an idiosyncratic license. Therefore, sysadmins are entitled to disparage him.

This story definitely makes me want to get more involved with organized free software.

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

#108

Post by tptacek »

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.

It's sad that Crockford wrote a piece of code and gave it away for free in such a way that some people feel they can't use it? How much sadder than all the code every YC company writes and doesn't publish at all?

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

#109

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

> because that same clause can get you in trouble even if it comes in the EULA of a proprietary product.

Could clauses like these get you the author in legal trouble? Or it's just you the incautious users?

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