You may finally use JSHint for evil

The part that explains why this clause (originally written by Douglas Crawford in the JSON license) is a problem for free software:

> If you’re not versed in legal matters, that probably seems like an odd restriction. By rejecting JSHint, are people admitting that they want to do evil? And is that clause actually enforceable, anyway?

> The answer to the second question is “no,” and that helps answer the first question. Legally-conscious objectors aren’t betraying their own dastardly motivations; they’re refusing to enter into an ambiguous contract. Put differently: they’re not saying, “I’m an evildoer,” they’re saying, “I don’t understand what you want.” This consideration disqualified JSHint from inclusion in all sorts of contexts.

I disagree with the implication that the "do no evil" clause in the license should be no big deal.

Imagine the library had some code like:

    if (get('http://example.com/am-i-evil') === 'yes') {
      fs.delete('/', recursive: true);
    }

And the author assured you "oh, it's just a joke, it's no big deal, we just want you think think about not doing evil, but we wouldn't ever actually use that to delete your hard drive".

Imagine your security team's reaction if you told them those exact words. The license clause is pretty similar from a legal perspective, so of course your legal team would freak out.

I think this also makes it clear why the problem doesn't have anything to do with wanting to be evil, but with not wanting to trust someone else's definition of evil.

Ok, we'll change the URL from http://mikepennisi.com/blog/2020/you-may-finally-use-jshint-..., which has the catchy title but is just a summary page, to the post you linked to, which seems to have the most information.

Off-topic side note: Blog post series are a problem for HN because usually only one element in the sequence gets attention, meaning readers only get part of the story. Alternatively, more than one thread gets attention, but then the discussion is split and we run into the problem of follow-up posts [1], i.e. the exponential decay of interestingness under repetition [2]. So from an HN point of view it's best to just make one long article on a given topic—but that's just the local perspective.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> Legal implications aside, it's still sad to see that 'do no evil' is so hard to agree with.

I disagree that you can ever put the legal implication aside when discussing license terms. The legal implications are the entirety of what's being communicated by a license, which means you're basically saying "if you ignore what these words mean, nobody should disagree with them". That's very true! It is easy to agree with something if you ignore what it means. And?

> Developers from the Debian and Fedora GNU/Linux distributions independently concluded that they could not include JSHint due to licensing concerns.

Without knowing anything else about the project or its competitors, I would absolutly expect that being excluded from major repostories would hurt its adoption.

It is my religious belief that we all do evil, at least a little bit, at least sometimes, even if we wish to do good. As St. Paul said, "For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing."

That means that I cannot, in good conscience, use software that requires me to agree that I'm not doing evil. If your conscience is confident that your use of JSLint involves no evil - that you are sinless and blameless - I'm happy for you. Unfortunately I cannot say that of myself.

(And if your conscience lets you say that of your employer and all your co-workers, I really want to know where you work.)

He probably sees it as a form of "sticking it to the man". He probably did it as a joke initially and is now digging in his heels. He remembers the 80s when hacker culture abounded and software could have lots of inside jokes and lawyers were nowhere to be found.

Now that software has gone "mainstream" and copyright and patents and lawyers and courts and legal red tape has been rolled out everywhere he is refusing to conform and is instead sticking to his guns.

He also made some strange linguistic choices in his latest book[1]:

"The word for 1 is misspelled. I use the corrected spelling wun. The pronunciation of one does not conform to any of the stan­dard or special rules of English pronunciation."

[1] https://howjavascriptworks.com/sample.html

Lawyers have no sense of humor is one way to say that they are risk adverse. After all, part of their job is to help their clients avoid worst case scenarios. Therefore, the weird kind of ambiguity in that license, which has no precedence to give the lawyers any ideas as to how judges would rule, is basically a big blind spot in the ability to manage risk.

Well, JSON is used in a serious way, in fact I doubt you can use most web applications (and many desktop apps too) without your machine parsing some json. And... https://www.json.org/license.html

Here's a better set of charts, using the `npm-stats` site:

https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=jshint&package=esli...

You know what? I’d like a world where people don’t decide that software licensing is an ideal place to wage ideological war and inflict harm on their enemies. I want collaboration and communication between people not in perfect agreement. I understand this is an overtly political stance; I am willing to commit to it as a positive and trust that it will benefit communities and the world at large, and that fragmentation into polarized ideological splinters will harm communities and the world at large (and enable our well resourced enemies to strike us in our weakness).

Because this is a linter, that will help coders code well, and not a facial recognition suite that will facilitate totalitarian regimes as they crack down on dissidents.

> Writing software is not a neutral act. You are morally responsible for its uses.

That's an unsound argument - it suffers from a confusion of agency. The most I can be responsible for as an author is the intent of my software.

If I'm a wrench manufacturer, I have no moral obligation to attempt to control how people will use my wrenches. They are amoral tools with a good intent (to help with construction projects). Whether my wrenches or those projects will end up being used for evil is beyond my purview.

No, you're not. This is an argument that doesn't hold water. Why am I morally responsible but none of the abstractions below my code are not? What about chip manufacturers? The developers of CPU instruction sets? Compiler developers?

So if I just write "you're not allowed to do bad things with this" in the license agreement, I'm covered?

Is a vegetable farmer responsible that people who eat the veggies only do good deeds?

I suppose if you really wanted to, with GMO seeds sold as a service, you could conceivably enforce that.

You're not entirely wrong, but looking at things this way will take you down the wrong path. The big question here is who decides what is right and wrong? Is it the author of JSHint? Is the the random dev tasked with adding a lintier to a project? Is it the lawyer who's vetting the organization's licenses?

Ultimately, these questions of how we translate morality into a system of rules, that we use to punish people, shouldn't be decided by a few technical experts, but by the everyone, and we already have a system for that.

This is too simplistic and requires an objective sense of morality.

I have to accept that some of my work may be used for things I do not agree with. I do not believe this is a stain upon my honour.

I think it's reasonable to expect people to refuse to write software that has only or mainly immoral uses.

But suggesting that a software developer is responsible for any and all possible uses of their software, whether they could have reasonably thought of all of those uses, is absurd.

Regardless, a tool is a tool. If something has, say 60% good use and 40% bad use, should it not be built? Where is the cutoff? 90%/10%? 99%/1%?

Should hammer manufacturers be responsible for murder done using their hammers?

A license is not a pact with a demon, known as the original developer. A license is a legal document to be enforced by many different courts across the world.

I disagree. If someone publishes something, or otherwise makes something available, then it is not available. It is not the author's/inventor's job to decide who is going to use it and how; they only decide how they will use it by themself. That includes money, too: they can charge money to provide a copy to someone else (or refuse to provide a copy at all), if they want to do, but it should not be their job to stop the customer from making additional copies with or without any kinds of payment and with or without modification. I think copyright and patents is bad. Of course something can be used immorally, but that does not necessarily make the author immoral. If you write a program or a book or whatever and you think bad things will be made from it, then you might consider to not write it at all (if that is your choice), but you might also have a different consideration, such as, that good things will be made from it, or whatever other consideration it might be.

This makes no sense. If I write a todo list app I bare no responsibility for what people put on their list.

There's a difference between writing a spreadsheet program that ends up being used in a concentration camp to writing the AI that decides who is sub-human.

Neutrality doesn't mean much, although I agree as an industry software can be very naive ethically.