Crockford on JSON license (2011) • Hacker News Board

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#61

Post by barnabee » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 9:12 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #41

harry8 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends, if the alternative is those laws are changed or removed from the statute books, their existence counterproductive for sure.

If the alternative is all the bad laws society regularly bends or ignores outright (suggesting there’s little or no democratic support for them) start being aggressively enforced, I’ll take never enforced every time.

In many societies there’s plenty of the latter.

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#62

Post by Joker_vD » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 12:30 PM UTC

psunavy03 wrote: post #34

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…

For those not aware, DoE is literally responsible for the design, testing, and manufacture of US nuclear weapons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_En...

In the Soviet Union, they gave its counterpart a wonderfully euphemistic name of "Ministry of Medium Machinery Building". Everyone knows what is "heavy machinery" and while "light machinery" is not a thing one could imagine what it could mean, but medium machinery? What the hell could that even be?

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#63

Post by gizmo686 » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 3:09 PM UTC

getmeinrn wrote: post #11

I was talking with a small startup founder about a project I had licensed under AGPL. He asked, "How do you know if someone uses your project against your licence though?" with a smile. His point wasn't anything new, but I still didn't have a great answer. I just said that it would require the company being honest and purchase a commercial license, and that I have personally worked at companies that evaluate their li…

Its not like paid software is immune from unlicensed use.

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#64

Post by ke88y » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 4:45 PM UTC

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.

What is the browser-based debugging tool story for compiled-to-WASM languages?

Re: Crockford on JSON license (2011)

#65

Post by ke88y » Fri, Jul 21, 2023, 4:50 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #39

em-bee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actually, the way i see it, the fact that people took the effort to contact the developer shows that they really wanted to use that. otherwise they would have just used it silently and the developer might not even find out about it. in some cases that might even have been an opportunity to earn some money.

I mean if he didn't charge IBM (and for such a broad license) he's surely not charging anyone else. I guess he opens a line of communication with them in some sense, but it's with some random staffer in the legal department rather than anyone who's going to be hiring contractors, and surely there would be friendlier ways if that was the goal (hell, just asking people to say hi would be starting you off on better term…

FWIW, I always recommend charging 3 months of jr dev time for cross-licensing and use the cash to pay for a project-related internship. It's win-win-win:

- you get help with your project,

- the project (and its corporate user) gets new features or bug fixes or refactors,

- the student gets a learning experience.

Mentoring does take a surprising amount of time, so you can also tack on a little extra and treat yourself to a weekend at a ski report (or whatever your thing is) as a "thank you" to yourself for the free mentorship :)