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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

#181

Post by irahul »

lmm wrote: post #103
irahul wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

So what is he supposed to do? His options are either use the MIT license unchanged, or invent his own? He liked the MIT license, and he wanted to add one of his own conditions. It's as simple as that.

As another commenter pointed out, the cognitive dissonance is the free software community is mind blowing. We are all for freedom and choice, as long as you are playing by our rules. We are against regulation, but only bad regulations. Ours are meant to do good and you are supposed to follow them.

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

#182

Post by irahul »

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 we can still have the opinion that he's a childish asshole.

We can also have the opinion that people who believe that someone who wrote a free software and gave the implementation for free should play by their rules and only use license which plays nice with their software are childish, entitled assholes.

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

#183

Post by lmm »

irahul wrote: post #181
lmm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. So what is he supposed to do? His options are either use the MIT license unchanged, or invent his own? He liked the MIT li…

While the right to fork is fundamental to the free software philosophy, on a social level we emphasise that it should be a last resort (and that it's often worth putting up with a less than ideal upstream in the interests of compatibility). E.g. the FSF recommends using the perl license for perl packages, even though it recommends against that license in general. This is nothing new.

What Crockford's done is the equivalent of changing a few bytes in the PNG format and making his software use this "new" format. Making a completely new file format/license is fine, but you should only do it when your improvements are big enough to justify the incompatibility. A new one that's just a trivial tweak to an existing one, but incompatible, is bad.

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

#184

Post by lmm »

darkarmani wrote: post #114
andreasvc wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work like that. For the code to be part of a Linux distribution like Debian, they have to be able to distribute it to everyone, so such a request would amount to asking can you please remove the clause from the license. And your point about not making demands to things you get for free is not true in general. When someone offers money to the local animal shelter under the condition that it's only used for…

Maybe someone add Debian should have paid attention when they included the incompatible license? This really looks like a Debian tantrum because they screwed up by including it. It seems like this Debian developer is mad because an author didn't write a license the way he want it written?

It's an easy mistake to make seeing how Crockford's license is almost, but not quite, identical to the MIT license (which would've been fine).

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

#186

Post by lucisferre »

tptacek wrote: post #159
lucisferre wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is anyone making that argument? From what I can see all people are saying is that making an obtuse licencing clause is a bit of an asshole thing to do. I can't see why anyone would disagree with that either.

This is one of those situations where 80% of the commenters in the thread will think I am trolling because their sense of entitlement to anything they can read in on a Github page is so powerful that they forget they're talking about the time and effort of an actual human being. If you feel like you can call someone an "asshole" for writing "use this software for good not evil" in their license, then, and I mean this…

Wow, the hypocrisy of using such poorly veiled ad hominem in an attempt call out what you apparently feel is mine, is almost comical. I'd ask you re-read what I said more carefully. It really wasn't nearly as extreme or insulting a statement as you seem to think. Certainly doesn't seem even remotely worth such personal ire.

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

#187

Post by gpvos »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #69

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 (whate…

> WTFPL requires you to change the "name" upon re-distribution

Just to be clear: only the name of the license, and only if you modify the license. So it's just the name "WTFPL" being protected. As for the thing being licensed, you are utterly and completely free to do anything you want with or to it.

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