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People always talk about Google's "Do no evil" policy as being more fundamental than their other business concerns, but they've demonstrated in the past that it
by geoffhill 15y ago
People always talk about Google's "Do no evil" policy as being more fundamental than their other business concerns, but they've demonstrated in the past that it comes secondary.
http://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code http://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code
The "Do no evil" policy has no use if they can't accept it into their legalese.
- jholman 15y agoThe JSMin license issue is not a case of "do no evil" coming secondary to "business concerns". Google's action there was motivated entirely by a desire to do no evil. Crockford thought it would be hilarious to put a joke line in a license. The joke line, lawyers apparently agree (at least IBM's and RedHat's), means that the so-licensed code has unclear usage restrictions that make it non-free. (IANAL, TINLA) JSMin-PHP inherited that license, even though the JSMin-PHP author doesn't particularly like the joke line (but he believes he's legally obliged to keep it). Google's original policy when setting up google code was that it would only allow free-licensed code. This policy was chosen in part in an effort to avoid evil, INCLUDING the small-but-real evil of confusing license proliferation and too many ways for two pieces of code to be legally incompatible. Crockford's code, and derivative code, falls afoul of this reasonable policy. You might disagree about the goodness/evilness of their approach, but saying that this one was business over ethics is total bullshit. Business took a backseat here.