Why the JSON license is supposedly "non-free"
gnu.org
gnu.org
http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=www.crockford.com%2Fcodeca...
It genuinely made me laugh :)
There is some weird stuff in our legal system, however they (typically) are asides amongst the core arguments, or in support of the core arguments of a legal case.
Remember that good lawyers are hackers. They're trying to find edge cases and tease at the margins of the representation of the world that has been encoded in law.
Big corp legal departments are like corporate security teams. They don't want to see anything that could surprise them, and ideally they're going to lock your corporate environment down as tightly as they possibly can.
Their job is to make sure no one else can screw with the way they've modeled the world.
If you really believe there can be a license that's "most free of all", that would be public domain (like SQLite).
Edit: you added the comment about SQLite after I replied. The problem with public domain is that it's messy. It has a specific legal definition which is not the same across jurisdictions (and in some places it's not recognized at all). It's cleaner and more succinct to say, "use this for whatever you want, including commercial purposes, but don't blame me for any problems".
I believe that BSD may, in fact, decrease net freedom. With GPL-like licenses, you always increase the amount of software that's released as free, because no such software can be closed up. With BSD-ish there is always the chance of one entity grabbing the software and running with it.
If you consider a win having the largest corpus of software released under a free license, then GPL is a superior solution, because it restricts no freedom but the one to close the software.
I don't mind people using the software I write to generate a private profit. I think there's a greater net benefit in allowing more opportunities for people to make a living.