3 ms·
> but using a license that looks very much like the MIT license but grants you a much smaller set of rights (a set which puts it on the other side of a line tha
by irahul 14y ago
> but using a license that looks very much like the MIT license but grants you a much smaller set of rights (a set which puts it on the other side of a line that, while in many ways arbitrary, is of great practical relevance when it comes reusing code in the wider internet community) is not nice.
So what is he supposed to do? His options are either use the MIT license unchanged, or invent his own? He liked the MIT license, and he wanted to add one of his own conditions. It's as simple as that.
As another commenter pointed out, the cognitive dissonance is the free software community is mind blowing. We are all for freedom and choice, as long as you are playing by our rules. We are against regulation, but only bad regulations. Ours are meant to do good and you are supposed to follow them.
- lmm 14y agoWhile the right to fork is fundamental to the free software philosophy, on a social level we emphasise that it should be a last resort (and that it's often worth putting up with a less than ideal upstream in the interests of compatibility). E.g. the FSF recommends using the perl license for perl packages, even though it recommends against that license in general. This is nothing new. What Crockford's done is the equivalent of changing a few bytes in the PNG format and making his software use this "new" format. Making a completely new file format/license is fine, but you should only do it when your improvements are big enough to justify the incompatibility. A new one that's just a trivial tweak to an existing one, but incompatible, is bad.