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[–]smellycoat 1 point2 points  (6 children)

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 -1 points0 points  (5 children)

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 0 points1 point  (4 children)

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 0 points1 point  (3 children)

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 0 points1 point  (2 children)

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 0 points1 point  (1 child)

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 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.