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JSON.org License Literally Says it "shall be used for Good, not Evil"
- dave1010uk 15y agoJSMin was removed from Google Code because of this licence. Douglas Crockford explains the reasoning behind the license: http://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code http://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code
- raganwald 15y agoCourtesy @llimllib: "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” site:http://code.google.com yields 35k results, they’ve got a lot of banning to do
- kamjam 15y agoThey should probably ban themselves while they are at it...
- aliguori 15y agoThe problem with this license is that this phrase is simply there to be cute. There is no legal definition of Evil and I don't see how you can come up with one. It accomplishes nothing other than making the license incompatible with other licenses and adding uncertainty.
- mvc 15y agoGiven their motto, shouldn't this particular clause be required rather than banned.
- eloisant 15y agoI remember a talk of Crockford, where he explained that. He also explained that it worried IBM lawyers, to the point that he signed them a document "authorizing IBM to do evil with his software".
- ejfinneran 15y agoHere is a clip from that talk where he mentions IBM contacting him. Pretty funny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCimLnIsDA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hCimLnIsDA
- anjesh 15y agoAn hour long video by Douglas Crockford where he explains about the licence somewhere after 40-45 minutes i think. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Heretical-Open-Source http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Heretical-Open-Source
- dspillett 15y agoI think IBMs concern was them being held responsible for their customers actions, rather than that they were concerned they might directly do something Crockford considered evil. An amusing anecdote none the less!
- kamjam 15y agoHe mentions that he put that clause in there after 9/11 and the war on terror had just started. So great, anyone who asks for exception from the clause should be the next focus of the Surpreme Lord and Ruler (the US government)... no need to waste all this money snooping through people's email and facebook accounts! Pretty funny nonetheless, more people should add these little clauses in :D
- unimpressive 15y ago> Pretty funny nonetheless, more people should add these little clauses in :D No they shouldn't. To you it's cute. To anyone who's serious about using JSON it's an arbitrary field of use limitation that could be construed to mean anything. In other words, it makes the software unusable for Real Work (TM). (Disclosure: I am not a lawyer.)
- kamjam 15y agoI meant it as a joke, but... That's the problem with the world and software today. It's a trigger happy lawyer friendly world that everyone is too quick to go sue for a quick buck. It wrongly taints legitimate people's work like this. If I was was Douglas then I would, at this point, refuse to change the license. If you don't want to use it due to some anal overpaid lawyer then your problem, use something else. A lawyer may tell you this makes your software unworkable, but common sense tells me that this clause means jack all. As you say, it could be construed to mean anything and a court with any common sense would throw out any claim. It would be difficult to fully define the term "evil". (Having said that, I understand it would probably cost a bucket load through the legal system, that same lawyer bending you over again)
- iloveponies 15y agoThe JSON spec is no longer exclusively under this license as it's part of both the ECMA 5 specification and formalised under RFC 4627 so the "do good not evil" tidbit (which, by the way, SQLite - http://www.sqlite.org/different.html http://www.sqlite.org/different.html also mentions) to me, doesn't appear to apply. Can we get over this and move on? Anyone would think a lot of people were swindled of something that was clearly not ill-intended.
- peterwwillis 15y agoTechnically SQLite is in the public domain, so you can do evil with it (public domain works are inherently more evil than Open Source-licensed works), and they only offer a blessing and not a requirement to do no evil. So SQLite is way more evil than JSON.
- knowtheory 15y agoForgive me, but could you expound further on how public domain works are inherently more evil than FOSS?
- jemfinch 15y agoI believe you'll find his explanation in the dictionary, somewhere between "humor" and "sarcasm".
- peterwwillis 15y agoFirst read the Open Source Definition: http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd Almost everything in there is dedicated to giving rights to the user instead of the other way around. In the end, even if a work is created "for evil", you can get the source code, change it and make it be for good. (Not to mention the whole non-discrimination thing is considered by some to be pretty "good" in nature) Public domain allows you to do anything you want at all with the source material and the product never has to give anyone any rights, prevent discrimination, allow access to the source code, or do anything positive whatsoever. I can take the SQLite source code, rebrand it "SQLPeter", change it so it corrupts your data randomly, remove all documentation and tests and keep the source code from you and charge $1,000 for support. The work itself may be made with the best of intentions, but the license (public domain) allows it to be used for more evil than the Open Source license would have permitted.
- peterwwillis 15y agoWell there goes my evil scheme to take over the world with a lightweight, text-based open standard. CURSE YOU LICENSING AGREEMENT!!!!
- jnbiche 15y ago+1000 for Dr. Doofenshmirtz allusion.
- 0x0 15y agoI saw this license buried within the iOS "Settings -> General -> About -> Legal Notices". So I guess neither Apple nor any iPhone-owning user may use the phone for evil.
- paraschopra 15y agoWell, what if they do? Would they get sued for at least two crimes? How silly.
- antonyh 15y agoGoogle won't have any problems then.
- evincarofautumn 15y agoIff “don’t be evil” = “don’t do evil”.
- antonyh 15y agoEvil is as evil does. Or are you suggesting that it's possible to be evil without doing evil, or vice versa?
- vlasta2 15y agoI have been using similar license with my freeware apps for some time http://www.rw-designer.com/entry/315 http://www.rw-designer.com/entry/315 I think when giving something away for free, it does not hurt to try to make the world a little better...
- davidw 15y agoYou're not making the world better though. Evil people will ignore your warning, and, if you're releasing as open source, people who are serious about licenses can't integrate your code with other stuff because of the "weird" license that doesn't make sense (who gets to define "evil"?).
- greyboy 15y agoWho and/or what defines "good" and "evil" for you? I see the list of you-may-nots on your site, but those also aren't (a) conclusive and (b) strictly defined (what constitutes an 'extreme' position, etc?). It's evident when certain articles are posted on Hacker News that even this crowd's diversity in backgrounds, experiences and morals vary over quite a range.
- simonbrown 15y agoSo creating an image arguing that software patents shouldn't be banned would violate the license?
- shareme 15y agoSo the TSA and CIA cannot use it?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- yaix 15y agoGood for who?
- solox3 15y agowhom
- yaix 15y agoSorry, English is my 4th foreign language. However, for more than some decades, both is gramatically correct (unlike in my native language where you actually have to use declinations). Anyway, it was a serious question.
- dredmorbius 15y agoWhile we're at it: "both are grammatically correct", would be grammatically and homographically correct, though counterfactual. But yes, the license does raise some rather intractable problems.
- dspillett 15y ago> But, the most important thing I take away from this license is that this additional clause adds an unnecessary complication… The standard (and correct) response to this is that if you don't like the license either don't use the code or negotiate (as IBM have done in this specific case) alternate terms. > one that many people don’t even know is lurking in their dependency tree. That is a due diligence failing on the part of those people, rather than a problem with this specific license. If you don't know that this clause is relevant to your dependencies then what else might be hidden in there that you are unaware of? A bit like the "blue M&Ms" (and other such) found in the riders for celebrities, they do that as a test to make sure people have bothered to read the information provided rather than any real need for the specific demand to be complied with.
- andersh 15y agoInterestingly, the original XML specification states that it "SHOULD be used for evil, but MAY be used for good".
- dewitt 15y agoPeople may make light of this, but as the dzone.com article points out, it's what's known as a Field of Use limitation [1], and it's an actual problem. The "good" vs "evil" thing is perhaps a red herring, but you can imagine the practical consequences if "free" software developers licensed their work for all purposes except competitors, etc. The Free Software Foundation raised this issue in the context of royalty-free patent licenses years ago [2], and the Open Source Initiative went so far as to say that if a license allowed for a "Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" then it wasn't an open source license at all [3]. I'm sure D. Crockford didn't do this to be malicious in any way, likely he even did it just to be cute, (maybe he even meant well by it!), but it's also a shame that it's persisted this long, as it sets a bad example for others. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-of-use_limitation [2] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/w3c-patent.html [3] http://www.opensource.org/osd.html
- raganwald 15y agoWhat a rotten shame that an author decided what he did or didn’t want others to do with the fruit of his labours. As you point out, this sets a bad example for others. Seriously? He’s an adult, he makes his choices, if it means people prefer other, fully free software that doesn’t necessitate lawerly wrangling, so what? His software isn’t free, and I’m fine with that, he did the work, he decides what we can or cannot do with it. http://raganwald.posterous.com/the-freedom-to-drink-coffee http://raganwald.posterous.com/the-freedom-to-drink-coffee
- dewitt 15y agoSure, but his making this choice means that his work is incompatible with the much larger body of already-established work. His decision is his own, but it's a direction I wouldn't want others to follow, since we all benefit more from the common adoption of a smaller handful of mutually compatible open source licenses. (Being legally allowed to remix code across projects is one of the great things about the OSI model. There are some silos within open source, such as copyleft vs permissive licenses, but at least each of those are already big enough sustain their own ecosystems.)
- gmaslov 15y agoI've been thinking about this problem with law a bit lately. It seems like our laywers & politicians want every legal question to be completely decidable, and this attitude leaks into popular culture too (or is it the other way around?), hence this article's preoccupation with the fact that good or evil intent cannot (as far as we know) be identified by any mechanical process. This type of thing is of course a problem in computer science, but the law is not a computer, and I wish we could stop treating it like one. With humans involved, it's quite feasible to make decisions about undecidable things. This process is called exercising judgement, and we hire judges to do it. Frankly, I don't see what the problem is with a "don't be evil" clause. Pretty much everyone understands what it means in most any given circumstance, even if we can't write down a decision procedure for it. I understand that part of the motivation here is the urge to CYA and offload all accountability for bad decisions from people to "the law". Not sure what to do about that. Further reading: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120... ; appeared on HN yesterday; from paragraph 7, argues that these attitudes are partly responsible for the current incarceration problem in America. (I wonder, can we make a proof of the undecidability of the good-vs-evil problem? I don't think it'll be as easy as for the halting problem; we know how to make a program halt or not halt, but it's unclear how to make a program "do something evil" or "do something good".)
- azernik 15y agoThere is a very good reason we want legal questions to be completely decidable - if they're not, people can't be sure ahead of time if they're breaking the law, which makes it ethically very problematic to actually enforce that law. ("You broke the law, and we're going to fine you." "But it was impossible to know that it was against the law!" "...")
- jerf 15y agoThe law should be predictable. This is obviously also not perfectly attainable, but we should not deliberately put ambiguities in there. Unpredictable laws directly lead to rule by men (as opposed to rule by law) and there's a lot of history and tradition on why that is undesirable.
- throw__ 15y agoIf you do evil despite such a license, and get caught, are you forced to undo it?
- TiredOfTat 15y agoMore emo trash on Hacker News. 4chan invasion?
- Vitaly 15y agoisn't it also has an exemption for "IBM and their minions" to do evil with json?
- wanderr 15y agoI don't understand why this poses a problem, even for lawyers. The clause is clearly unenforcible so why can't it just be ignored? Is there seriously some concern that a judge would decide that it is enforcible?
- jay_kyburz 15y ago"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." Surly this is just a statement of fact. That once embedded in your software, you program will be considered Good. It doesn't change the line above which grants the user the rights to use the software "without restriction"
- spyder 15y agoBut how can the Javascript Object Notation have a license? It's part of the Javascript language isn't? So we cannot use javascript objects for evil or?
- dredmorbius 15y agoThis would also appear to violate the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), clause 6, and possibly 5. http://www.debian.org/social_contract http://www.debian.org/social_contract ... and there's a reimplimentation, jsmin.py: http://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code#comment-5681 http://wonko.com/post/jsmin-isnt-welcome-on-google-code#comm... (Joey Hess is a long-time Debian developer).