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Crockford on JSON license (2011)

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Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#41

Post by lmm »

harry8 wrote: post #38
macksd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing compelling the author, no, except for in the situation outlined above they're really doing nothing to prevent military use, but they are hampering adoption among companies scrupulous or careful enough to not run afoul of a poorly defined legal term. Seems counter-productive to the apparent motives.

Only law abiding people follow the law too, what's the point of them?

Laws that are at least somewhat enforced can be good. Laws that are never enforced are counterproductive.

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#42

Post by [deleted] »

macksd wrote: post #6

While this is funny, it does highlight that you should probably have an actual legal opinion if you decide to write your own license. A less tongue-in-cheek example that I've run into is https://dst.lbl.gov/ACSSoftware/colt/license.html . "any usage related to military applications is expressly forbidden", which is still poorly defined enough that it makes lots of corporate lawyers nervous and you end up having to re…

[deleted]

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#43

Post by CoastalCoder »

lstamour wrote: post #14

I’d heard this one before. And yep, sure enough, it was sourced from a video from 2011. Definitely one of my favourites tho. It was also previously discussed in 2022 at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31027104 and in 2013 at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866 and probably at other times, but I’m on my phone and can’t search it up now. Also, I’m pretty sure if you wanted to, you can now use JSLint for e…

I'd refer you to the term "lawful evil", but I suspect Wizards of the Coast would sue me.

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#45

Post by seattle_spring »

kubectl_h wrote: post #29

It's little wonder that javascript is such a fraught, inferior language and ecosystem given it was so heavily influenced by Crockford and Eich. In a way I'm glad that the future of compute in the browser (such as WASM, et. al), will be dictated by corporate overlords so we don't have to deal with such mercurial personalities.

You must really hate GPL then

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#46

Post by kmeisthax »

pabs3 wrote: post #28
macksd wrote: post #6

While this is funny, it does highlight that you should probably have an actual legal opinion if you decide to write your own license. A less tongue-in-cheek example that I've run into is https://dst.lbl.gov/ACSSoftware/colt/license.html . "any usage related to military applications is expressly forbidden", which is still poorly defined enough that it makes lots of corporate lawyers nervous and you end up having to re…

Hmm, doesn't the LGPL allow you to remove any additional restrictions?

It says it does, but in at least one lawsuit courts have outright said that this language does not apply to copyright holders. Which is explicitly opposed to the FSF's own intent drafting the license, which was to prohibit copyright owners from calling their license "GPL plus (insert nonfree clause here)"

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#47

Post by ilaksh »

I think it's pretty funny that the lawyer suspects some of their clients are probably evil and his response is just to try to fix the clause so that evil is allowed.

Rather than trying to find a job that doesn't involve evil.

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#48

Post by macksd »

harry8 wrote: post #38
macksd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing compelling the author, no, except for in the situation outlined above they're really doing nothing to prevent military use, but they are hampering adoption among companies scrupulous or careful enough to not run afoul of a poorly defined legal term. Seems counter-productive to the apparent motives.

Only law abiding people follow the law too, what's the point of them?

There isn't even a law preventing direct military usage of that library as far as I understand, because they're not violating copyright law by just downloading something, which by the way is hosted using federal funds. But the absurdity of high energy physics / national nuclear research labs saying you can't use the software for military applications, and then this mainly comes up in civilian applications with nervous lawyers? Yeah it's missing the point more than you seem to be implying.

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#49

Post by cortesoft »

macksd wrote: post #21
verve_rat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... no? There is nothing compelling these organisations to use that particular piece of software. When contacted the author could just shrug and say "not my problem" and the organisation would just have to find some other software to use. The author has no obligation to make things easier for people that don't know if they are doing evil or not, or if they are military or not.

There's nothing compelling the author, no, except for in the situation outlined above they're really doing nothing to prevent military use, but they are hampering adoption among companies scrupulous or careful enough to not run afoul of a poorly defined legal term. Seems counter-productive to the apparent motives.

With something like this, the apparent motive is more likely to signal to other people his views on the military, more so than actually preventing them from using the software.

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#50

Post by School-Cotton »

jrflowers wrote: post #32
School-Cotton wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, which is why this license is probably much more restrictive than its author intended. Many serious organizations simply won’t use something for which the meaning of the license terms is unclear to this extent. That of course doesn’t mean they “plan on using it for evil” or anything of the sort.

I’d think that it wouldn’t make for a very restrictive license. Since there’s no agreement on what “evil” means whatsoever, it doesn’t seem that different from putting “You can not use this code to hooplebop shanglefronks” Edit: I guess there’s that TV show “Evil”. It would be funny if IBM had that production company as a client.

> there’s no agreement on what “evil” means whatsoever

Indeed, which is why lawyers won’t want to take the risk.

I’m sure they wouldn’t want to use software whose license claims you can’t “hooblepop shanglefronks” either, for that matter, without discussing with the owner to clarify what that means.

Essentially the practical meaning of this license is “this can’t be used by companies with careful lawyers who take license terms seriously”, which I doubt was the intent.

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