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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

#71

Post by rmc »

markokocic wrote: post #12

I don't understand. The guy complain that json license is not "Free" in the FSF sense of "Free". So what? Not all licenses has to be FSF or FSF compatible. How is it harmful to FSF is the license of some piece of code is not compatible with GPL? Guess what, I can't use GPL in my projects, because it's not compatible with the kind of license I release my programs. You can't use this software because it's not comapatib…

"Free" for the FSF does not mean "compatible with GPL".

Lots of GPL in-compatible licences are "Free" according to the FSF. Here's a whole list of "GPL-Incompatible Free Software Licenses": http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibl... Some notable ones: Apache Licence, BSD licence, etc.

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

#73

Post by rmc »

klausa wrote: post #45

>It’s fairly clear that the JSON.org license clause goes against both of these, making any piece of software using that license neither Open Source nor Free Software I'm sorry, is there some definition of Open Source that I'm not aware of?

There are a few definitions. The FSF has one http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html the OSI has one http://opensource.org/osd-annotated Debian has one http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines They are nearly all extactly the same.

Another defintion is if the code is released under and OSI approved "open source licence" (http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical ) or an FSF approved "free software licence" ( http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html ). Again AFAIK, nearly exactly the same.

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

#74

Post by rmc »

scotty79 wrote: post #15

Good and evil are arbitrary concepts that are not formally recognized by courts (am I wrong?) so the phrase in the licence is meaningless. How can anyone be so lawyerised to care about that? Lawyers, licences, copyrights, patents are modern though police. So many people consider every creative action (and unfortunately often abandon it) afraid of what laws they might be potentially braking by executing this action.

Good and evil are arbitrary concepts that are not formally recognized by courts (am I wrong?)

I'm pretty sure court judgements have use moralistic statements and refered to things like "respect" or "evil", "inhuman". Judges are humans, not compilers.

In fact a search of the British court judgements shows many instances of "evil" being referred to in judgements ( http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/sino_search_1.cgi?sort=rank&#3... ).

It's the legal ambiguity that is the problem.

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

#75

Post by michaelt »

rmc wrote: post #67
raganwald wrote: post #34

Shouldn't this be, Why you should know what you're doing legally before you contribute code to free software? Or perhaps, The system works, notice how we avoided the mistake of including software with an eccentric and non-free license from being included in free software? It takes me back to the frenzy over VLC on iOS. People write code, we need to respect their choices with respect to how they license it, even if th…

the GPL is un-free Now that's a contentous statement, depending on one's definition of "free" and "un-free". However the GPL, unlike this "no evil licence", is an FSF approved, and OSI approved, and DFSG approved licence. They aren't in the same category.

If FSF had the foresight to trademark Free Software™ and Open Source™ we wouldn't have this sort of confusion.

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

#76

Post by skreech »

jballanc wrote: post #53

Sometimes I find the cognitive dissonance in the software community to be as entertaining to watch as that in various religious sects... Software types are famously inclined toward libertarian views. An oft repeated mantra on HN is "let the market decide". Yet, here we have myriad complaints about a decision the market has made. What I particularly love about the Open Source/Free Software world is that it is a market…

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?

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

#77

Post by jballanc »

skreech wrote: post #76
jballanc wrote: post #53

Sometimes I find the cognitive dissonance in the software community to be as entertaining to watch as that in various religious sects... Software types are famously inclined toward libertarian views. An oft repeated mantra on HN is "let the market decide". Yet, here we have myriad complaints about a decision the market has made. What I particularly love about the Open Source/Free Software world is that it is a market…

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.

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

#78

Post by nicholassmith »

kaolinite wrote: post #46
irahul wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> " I'd argue Mono is intrinsically evil" > Could you explain why this is? I use Mono and I'm genuinely interested. From the op's profile: "I really don't like Microsoft much." Apparently not liking MS much is reason enough to dislike an open source project implementing an interesting runtime and languages, which provides options to use aforementioned runtime and languages without being married to MS.

I suspect the reason he dislikes it, as many seem to, is that it's potentially legally unstable as Microsoft own IP related to C# and .net. I don't know the specifics (I don't use Mono myself), but I have heard people talking about possible problems in future if Microsoft changes their mind about encouraging Mono.

There's plenty of possible problems, but I think Microsoft regards it as a nice way to keep developers developing using their tools, similar to how Adobe takes a pretty hands off approach on piracy of Photoshop.

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

#79

Post by rbanffy »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #33
rbanffy wrote: post #16

The author makes a valid point - people should be able to use free software for any purpose and inclusion of this restriction in the license makes it non-free. In this specific case, I'd argue Mono is intrinsically evil and therefore should be prevented from using Crockford's software at all. If Microsoft embeds a Crockford-based JSON parser in their own releases, they are in clear violation of its terms. ;-)

" I'd argue Mono is intrinsically evil" Could you explain why this is? I use Mono and I'm genuinely interested.

My concern is that by using Mono you make the .NET runtime more popular and Windows more valuable. Since Microsoft has a long history of hostility towards software freedom (despite several open-source software they publish themselves), I don't think it's wise to further empower them.

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

#80

Post by rbanffy »

nicholassmith wrote: post #78
kaolinite wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the reason he dislikes it, as many seem to, is that it's potentially legally unstable as Microsoft own IP related to C# and .net. I don't know the specifics (I don't use Mono myself), but I have heard people talking about possible problems in future if Microsoft changes their mind about encouraging Mono.

There's plenty of possible problems, but I think Microsoft regards it as a nice way to keep developers developing using their tools, similar to how Adobe takes a pretty hands off approach on piracy of Photoshop.

Exactly.

The more people use Mono, the more valuable the .NET runtime, and Windows itself, becomes.

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