It seems to me that Zed felt that he had been taken advantage of from users of his open source software in the past and this is simply a provision to guard against that. Whether you agree with his reasoning or not, it's not fair to just dismiss it and assume malicious intent.
Imagine you tell your neighbors they can use your pool so long as they act responsibly otherwise their access would be revoked. You're not going to spell out every little thing that they can/cannot do. You'd just hope that they'd use common sense and revoke their access if they do something you find intolerable. Imagine your neighbor responding to this offer, "Uhh yea, that's not going to work for me. I want unrevokable access." Ridiculous right?
As far as I can tell, nobody assumed it was malicious, so maybe you can put that straw back in storage.
This isn't a straw man. Read the parent:
"No, but the clause in that license is gross. He can sue any of his users at any time if he decides he doesn't want them to be his users anymore."
OP is entitled to his opinion, but he's not giving Zed the benefit of the doubt. He is framing it in a way that makes it seem Zed will exercise this right unreasonably. At least, that's the way I understood what he said.
You appear to be arguing that the behavior isn't gross in general, in which case rando definitely is the right measure. Maybe you're only arguing it's not gross when Zed Shaw does it. That seems dubious to me, in that a) most people don't know who he is, and b) many reasonable people differ from you in their analysis of his reliability. (Indeed, many people mainly know him as being a high drama jackass. [1]) Maybe you're just arguing it's not gross to you and when it's Zed Shaw, but even there the neighbor thing is a bad analogy in that your relationship with Zed Shaw is not social, but parasocial. There is no reciprocal benefit serving as a check on his behavior.
> He is framing it in a way that makes it seem Zed will exercise this right unreasonably. At least, that's the way I understood what he said.
You understood it poorly. He said "can", not "will". Contracts are not about giving people the benefit of the doubt. They're about locking things down to remove doubt. If we just assumed good things about everyone, we wouldn't need contracts. So this is analysis of capability, not intent.
Given that the clause is there, I think there are two reasonable interpretations: a) Zed Shaw is an idiot, who puts random clauses into licenses, or b) Zed Shaw is reasonably smart, and put that clause in there because he was thinking of cases where he'd use it. On whom? In what circumstances? The license doesn't say. It introduces a great deal of legal risk, and of doubt. It seems a little rich to me for Shaw to go out of his way to create a great deal of doubt and have anybody expect he should be given the benefit of it.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/01/zed-shaw-puts-the-smack-do...
You seem to be arguing that the analogy is bad because there is no check on his behavior, I don't know why this is a necessary condition, but it's not true anyway, there's the same check as in the analogy: reputation. If I deny access to someone to my pool for no reason or a bad reason, my reputation will suffer in the community. It's the same thing in open source. That is why it is often described by people as a community.
I don't think I did understand it poorly. Using a word like "gross" denotes a certain emotion. They also said, "I would rather use non-free software than risk being sued just for being a user." This makes it sound like getting "sued for just being a user", in other words, unreasonably, is likely. All I'm saying is that I don't think that risk is as high as OP is making it seem, especially if you're not a bad neighbor, which I think is a reasonable thing for Zed to expect.
I'm arguing the analogy is bad because it is not congruent to the circumstance. Zed Shaw does not have a personal, reciprocal relationship with everybody who sees that package and thinks about using it. One does have a personal, reciprocal relationship with the neighbor using one's pool. (Reputation is possibly a consideration, but strongly secondary.)
> This makes it sound like getting "sued for just being a user", in other words, unreasonably, is likely.
No. It makes it sound like a possibility. Which it is, or the clause wouldn't be there. A possibility of an unknown frequency but with significant risk, so worth considering during license examination.
I would rather use non-free software than risk being sued just for being a user.