Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software

> Before the jokers in the room claim that this kind of problem is deserved by Mono

Sizzle.

You chose that word carefully (and even underlined it). Are you sure, eleven minutes later, that you really mean that?

You would hate a person who took the time and effort to build a piece of software, then clean up and release the source code for anybody to use? A person who is doing a selflessly good thing that possibly benefits others and at the very least does no harm? You'd hate this person? Not just disagree with or be annoyed by, but hate?

Is that really the sort of person you want to be?

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, just leave the notice in the source, and don't sue me." I love that license, it's really good.

But this was late in 2002, we'd just started the War On Terror, and we were going after the evil-doers with the President, and the Vice-President, and I felt like I need to do my part.

[laughter]

So I added one more line to my license, which was: "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." I thought I'd done my job. About once a year I'll get a letter from a crank who says: "I should have a right to use it for evil!"

[laughter]

"I'm not going to use it until you change your license!" Or they'll write to me and say: "How do I know if it's evil or not? I don't think it's evil, but someone else might think it's evil, so I'm not going to use it." Great, it's working. My license works, I'm stopping the evil doers!

Audience member: If you ask for a separate license, can you use it for evil?

Douglas: That's an interesting point. Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company--I don't want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their initials--IBM...

[laughter]

...saying that they want to use something I wrote. Because I put this on everything I write, now. They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that?

Of course. So I wrote back--this happened literally two weeks ago--"I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

[laughter and applause]

And the attorney wrote back and said: "Thanks very much, Douglas!"

Good talk, worth a watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-JoyNuQJs

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.