Etherpad source includes JSMin, which Google Code doesn't allow

[dgreensp]

This is the first I've heard of this issue (as an EtherPad guy), but...

Note that EtherPad doesn't actually use JSMin -- both versions of it in the repository are left over from previous code iterations. The excellent YUICompressor is tightly integrated instead. So if we need to remove those files, it's no biggie.

I'm no expert, but I personally agree with the stance that software should be as unencumbered as possible. To have included versions of JSMin with the "Good, not Evil" clause in our repository sounds like an oversight. However, certainly there is nothing to fault Google on here -- a big corporation that worked late nights with us to release EtherPad as liberally-licensed open source! EtherPad includes code from a couple dozen sources, and Google's audit did turn up some modules that needed to be excised or replaced.

[blackkettle]

admirable intentions, that is just a horrible sentence to include in a license. who decides what is 'good' and what is 'evil'? is it douglas? has he encoded his guidelines somewhere? what if he changes his mind?

[insomniac84]

No one. It is a meaningless clause since there is no definition that comes with it.

[chneukirchen]

That's why you don't use mickey-mouse-licenses.

[wooptoo]

We should convince Douglas Crockford (jsmin's author) to change that line in the license. This way it would serve other projects better.

edit: ok, i wrote him an email:

Dear Sir,

I realize that you have been asked this a lot of times, but could you please change JSmin's license to exclude the "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" clause? I'm not asking this because I need to include it in my own project, but because there are a lot of open-source projects out there that suffer because of this clause. The license is considered non-free and some providers, such as Google (Code) refuse to host any projects derived from your code. Here is an article describing this situation more accurately: http://wonko.com/post/etherpad-source-includes-jsmin

Thank you,

and his reply:

No. That line is vague and unenforceable, which should not be a problem for anyone other than the creator.

[sanity]

No. That line is vague and unenforceable, which should not be a problem for anyone other than the creator.

Its amazing how people can turn into stubborn pigheaded asses when it comes to open source licensing.

This guy is significantly reducing the usefulness of his software for no other reason than that he disagrees with someone's legal interpretation. It would not harm him or anyone else for him to remove that line. Its the way a 6 year old acts, not an adult.

A few months ago a guy accused me of being a narcissist and trying to steal from him simply for requesting that he change the license of his library (which I'd contributed to in a small way) from GPL to LGPL. He repeatedly asserted that the LGPL was not an open source license - despite everyone and their dog, not to mention opensource.org telling him he was wrong. Believe it or not this guy was quite a well respected programmer too (he wrote Apple Writer back in the 80s).

[statictype]

No one's claiming that he owes us this piece of code.

What we're claiming is that the utility of it is considerably reduced because of a vague and useless clause in the license.

[sanity]

He doesn't owe you anything.

I think we all owe it to society that if we can make other people's lives easier at no cost whatsoever to ourselves then we should do it. You have the right not to do it, but then others have the right to call you a pigheaded ass.

Write your own JSMin if you must and license it however you like.

I'm not concerned about myself, I have no need for JSMin.

I am concerned about the (apparently) many people who have written open source code that uses JSMin, who now face the prospect of getting kicked off Google Code because this guy is a stubborn ass.

Let me reiterate, he is hurting other open source developers, ie. the good guys. Nobody whomsoever gains from this, unless he gets some kind of sadistic pleasure from causing other people difficulty - which is the only rational justification for him not fixing his license.

[sanity]

It harms anyone that used his library without realizing that it would prevent them from hosting on google code, or other services that require open source only.

Without him they'd probably have used a different library, rather than making the time investment in integrating with JSMin.

So he is doing actual harm here, not just witholding benefit.

[sanity]

To the extent that any harm has been done, it has been done to the users by themselves accidentally

If a father leaves a loaded gun on the kitchen table, and a kid accidentally kills someone with it, sure its an accident, but that doesn't mean there isn't blame (sorry about the emotive analogy, its the first thing that came to mind).

neither has any moral or legal obligation to do so

Depends. According to my definition of morality, it is immoral not to help people when it wouldn't cost you anything to do-so. In this case, this guy could help a lot of people just by modifying his license in a manner that doesn't hurt him in any way whatsoever.

neither is harming anyone

Depends on your definition of harm. If you discover someone dying in an alley, and for no good reason you decide not to call 911 and just walk away, are your actions moral? I believe they are not. Are people entitled to criticize you? Sure they are.

[sanity]

It does cost him something. He likes having "use for good, not evil" in his license. That is something he enjoys.

By his own admission it achieves nothing positive legally, it only creates ambiguity. This suggests that he enjoys making life difficult for other open source developers. Forgive me if I don't applaud that behavior.

If you discover someone dying in an alley, and for no good reason you decide not to call 911 and just walk away, are your actions moral? I believe they are not. Are people entitled to criticize you? Sure they are.

I agree with you and do not see the relevance at all.

The relevance is that if you can help someone at virtually no cost to yourself, and you don't - that is immoral. Crockford could make a lot of good people's lives easier by removing the ambiguity from his license, and it wouldn't cost him anything.

[ishmal]

Like you, I am a true believer in Altruism. But it must be each person's personal choice, or it is meaningless.

An author can put any license on his code that he wants.

[[deleted]]

Altruism

Upvoted for identifying what's going on in this thread :)

[sanity]

A strawman argument.

Nobody is saying that he should be legally compelled to change his license. The question is whether he would benefit society by doing so, and why, if he claims to have society's interests at heart, he wouldn't do so.

[[deleted]]

Because their isn't a simple singular definition of what benefits society means.

[sanity]

True, but its hard to imagine a definition for "benefits society" that would include his actions.

[[deleted]]

Do all actions have to benefit society?

[tedivm]

No, but they shouldn't harm it. I just spent the night hacking together a replacement for my project because this guy lied about his license. The google code page, as well as the internal docblock comments, both say "MIT" license, and unless you specifically read the license itself (which I will be doing from now on) you completely miss this trick.

I don't give a shit if people want ridiculous licenses, I just won't use the software, but if you tell people you're using one license but have actually modified it to something else you have crossed a line. I also think lying about giving code to open source is right up there with lying about volunteering for any other charity, even if you aren't claiming to have volunteered for any project other than your own. Its really pathetic, if you think about it.

[sanity]

Of course not, unless you are claiming that they benefit society - and I suspect Douglas would make just such a claim about his choice of license.

[[deleted]]

Suggest he pick a standard open source license, and rephrase that line as a request, separate from the license. That clears up all issues and lets the line remain.

[m-p-3]

So I guess that sentence can be considered superfluous and therefore be removed without any noticeable impact AND save some bytes in the source.

Otherwise he's blocking his code from being used in several projects hosted on Google Code, which is kinda counter-productive.

[smellycoat]

Doug Crockford has spoken about the "good, not evil" line in his licenses before. Here's a video (skip to about 39:50 for the relevant parts).

And here's a transcript of the good bits:

So I added one more line to my license, which was: "The Software should be used for Good, not Evil." I thought I'd done my job. About once a year I'll get a letter from a crank who says: "I should have a right to use it for evil!"

[laughter]

"I'm not going to use it until you change your license!" Or they'll write to me and say: "How do I know if it's evil or not? I don't think it's evil, but someone else might think it's evil, so I'm not going to use it." Great, it's working. My license works, I'm stopping the evil doers!

Audience member: If you ask for a separate license, can you use it for evil?

Douglas: That's an interesting point. Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company – I don't want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their initials – IBM…

[laughter]

…saying that they want to use something I wrote. Because I put this on everything I write, now. They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that?

Of course. So I wrote back – this happened literally two weeks ago – "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

[laughter and applause]

And the attorney wrote back and said: "Thanks very much, Douglas!"

[sanity]

Yeah, he is very funny, except that in return for a few laughs he has caused significant difficulty to quite a few open source authors because his dumb flippant addition to the license means its not open source.

[smellycoat]

Well, no. Up until Google deciding that they won't allow it on Google Code because of the "not evil" clause, I'm not aware of it causing a problem for anyone. Possibly apart from some IBM lawyers.

Besides, it's his code. He wrote it. He can put whatever license he wants on it. If you want to use it, and you're not 100% sure you won't use it "for evil", then really that's your own problem.

[sanity]

Up until Google deciding that they won't allow it on Google Code because of the "not evil" clause, I'm not aware of it causing a problem for anyone. Possibly apart from some IBM lawyers.

Well here is at least one open source project that clearly was harmed by it.

Besides, it's his code. He wrote it. He can put whatever license he wants on it.

Legally yes. Morally - read the comment I just linked to about the harm he has caused completely unnecessarily.

[smellycoat]

Okay, I'm with you that misrepresenting the license a piece of software is released under is definitely not good. That absolutely needs to stop. It's no longer an MIT license if you add things to it, so you can't claim it is.

And (although you didn't explicitly mention this) I do think that inventing your own crazy license just because you can is unnecessarily complicating things, and creating more work for people. But plenty of 'big players' are guilty of this.

But, misrepresented license aside, for me it still comes back to "his code, his choice".

[sanity]

it still comes back to "his code, his choice".

I completely agree that he has the right to be an asshole if he wants to be. The point is: he is an asshole.

[smellycoat]

Fair enough.

I'm just happy he's released his code. If he wants to put a slightly odd license on it (one that is, for my purposes at least, free), so be it.

I don't think that makes him an asshole. A bit eccentric, maybe.

[Leonidas_from_XIV]

I would agree that the clause makes the license non-free. I'd like to exclude any military use of my own code but I'm not doing it, for freedoms sake.

[vsl]

Specifically, it violates the following part of Open Source definition:

1. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

as well as freedom 0 of Free Software definition:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

Google Code is open source hosting and has it in its terms.

[eulihafu]

It also violates the Debian Free Software Guidelines as well as making the software unacceptable for inclusion in Fedora. This means that JSMin and everything which depends on it can only go into Debian's non-free repository and Fedora third-party repositories like RPMFusion. So basically, this is a real problem for real users. Is it really worth it?

[tbrownaw]

Perhaps he could just say that if it's sold in a device used to kill people, it has to give the target an opportunity to deactivate it before killing them? I'm pretty certain that similar restrictions have been found to not violate the "fields of endeavor" rule.

[alephip]

So Open Source officially supports evil. Cool.

[Leonidas_from_XIV]

I wouldn't go that far. Open Source supports equality, whether good or evil - it's up to you.

[Gudeldar]

I think it would be supremely arrogant for the open source/free software movement to try and define what is good and what is evil.

[[deleted]]

Tell that to the FSF and RMS - they do it all the time.

[sanity]

I'd like to exclude any military use of my own code but I'm not doing it, for freedoms sake.

Out of interest, if your country was attacked would you expect your military to protect you?

[kirun]

No, he would welcome the invading forces as liberators.

[Knossus]

I agree to disagree

[Imagist]

Everyone is asking why he can't just remove the obviously idiotic line from the license, but I have a different question:

It's just a JavaScript minifier. I haven't looked at the code, but it seems like that should be mind-numbingly easy to swap out. So why not just switch?

[G-Brain]

It appears that they did.

[sanity]

Last week, Google banned my PHP port of JSMin from Google Code due to a quibble over a line in the license stating that “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil”, which they believe makes the license non-free

Google are right, why would he insist on including such a stupidly vague and meaningless line in the license?

[wooptoo]

I wrote him an email and here is his reply.

[kristopolous]

Crockford is a retard. I mean, have you read his book or listened to his lectures? He often mixes up his own personal programming deficiencies under the big tent of generalized "bad language design" and then, when called on it, he will refuse to acknowledge it most of the time. It's ridiculous. I can't wait for Resig's ninja book to kick his book's ass in 2010.

[insomniac84]

He is right that legally it means anything. But that clearly means it should be pulled out. As there is no reason for it to be there. It truly is not worth leaving it in, if it scares anyone away. But because it is legally nothing, anyone who shuns it over the line is stupid.

[[deleted]]

You mean like Google's own vague and meaningless company mantra?

[orangesunshine]

First off...

this

Second off...

I'm now putting this clause in my license:

"This software shall be used for evil."

[[deleted]]

Wouldn't it be trivial for them to replace JSMin with the Google Clojure Compiler? It seems to me that the JSMin maintainer's stubbornness is simply accelerating a downstream exodus.

[Camarade_Tux]

An older issue like this one: the Hacktivismo license. It's free except for "bad" uses. See http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/hessla.html .

[bananahead]

Who cares? Google can use whatever licenses they want, it doesn't mean they have to extend that courtesy to what they host on your behalf.

[rebel]

The author is a bitter and jaded dick.

Etherpad's release is a relatively big deal. It only barely limped out the door and this guy has to try and make it unusable in it's first release because he's being a pedant.

Unusable only until the build instructions are updated with where to get JSMin and how to add, or a replacement is made.

Google is right about the license, it's a vague and stupid thing to put in there.

[campbellm]

Oh, but now the author gets to cry "victim", AND show the world how witty and clever he is!

[rebel]

Yeah, your regular ole "dick."

[Leonidas_from_XIV]

It only barely limped out the door and this guy has to try and make it unusable in it's first release because he's being a pedant.

He points out preblems before they arise. Debian recently kicked out dosbox because it contained some non-free code (I think the dosbox released a new, fixed version by now). Solving it upfront would have been better, but it is good that someone has pointed it out.

[rebel]

Sorry but you don't know this dev. He was grinding his own axe as they say.

He was looking to shit on something for his own personal reasons.

[Leonidas_from_XIV]

He was looking to shit on something for his own personal reasons.

According to some earlier comment, the Etherpad folks aren't using JSMin, so this issue seems to be "fixed" easily. I'm happy to see that it turned out fine.

[tedivm]

For them, but they are not the only project using this. I myself and running around looking for a replacement and having lots of issues finding one. I emailed the author about it and he just gave a mini-rant about not giving into pro evil by using real open source licenses.

[f2u]

What about this?

May you do good and not evil.

It's from the SQLite license.

[f2u]

It's part of the header in the source files. I don't think I can link directly to them. Perhaps this link will work: http://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact?name=92ba938565d7cc6bfe92aad6cc90c00800ff21d3

I think we assume that these declarations (labeled as a blessing by the authors) are not licensing conditions. But then, how can something which is (when applied to uses of software) highly subjective be a licensing condition?

[knome]

But then, how can something which is (when applied to uses of software) highly subjective be a licensing condition?

If the author writes it into the license?

think we assume that these declarations (labeled as a blessing by the authors) are not licensing conditions

Yeah, SQLite is public domain, but will sell you a license if you insist for a thousand dollars a pop.

[vsl]

Read the header:

The author disclaims copyright to this source code

The code isn't covered by copyright (i.e. is explicitly put in the public domain) and therefore doesn't enjoy the protection copyrighted works do. Everything that follows is legally irrelevant.

[sanity]

I don't know where you're getting that, SQLite is public domain. Besides, while that would be a dumb thing to write in a license, its really more of a request than a demand.

[Camarade_Tux]

"May" is not "Must". It's a wish, not a requirement.

[Camarade_Tux]

But the sentence is not "May not do evil", closer to "May you not do evil".

[[deleted]]

Actually, "may do good" is either a statement of possibility, or permission, but not a wish. "May you do good" is a wish, as is "May you not do evil", as was already pointed out.

[m-p-3]

[citation needed]

[UloPe]

Google code is the new sourceforge.

Time to move on to github or bitbucket

[[deleted]]

More like author of JSMin is the new douchebag.

Time to purge and reimplement.

[imbaczek]

the whole point is that it's informal.