Crockford on JSON license (2011)
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
It's also not clear to me that this does actually make it illegal for the military to just use it directly, even if they cared about following the letter of the law. If copyright is the real power behind the enforcement of open-source licenses, I'm not sure usage is something the license grantor gets to dictate as long as you're not redistributing something.
And even if LBL isn't developing nuclear weapons they seem a mite closer to it than that.
There is nothing compelling these organisations to use that particular piece of software. When contacted the author could just shrug and say "not my problem" and the organisation would just have to find some other software to use.
The author has no obligation to make things easier for people that don't know if they are doing evil or not, or if they are military or not.
If the alternative is all the bad laws society regularly bends or ignores outright (suggesting there’s little or no democratic support for them) start being aggressively enforced, I’ll take never enforced every time.
In many societies there’s plenty of the latter.
> All other non-permissive additional terms are considered "further restrictions" within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.
And the LGPLv3 incorporates the GPLv3 by reference, then grants additional permissions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_En...
- you get help with your project,
- the project (and its corporate user) gets new features or bug fixes or refactors,
- the student gets a learning experience.
Mentoring does take a surprising amount of time, so you can also tack on a little extra and treat yourself to a weekend at a ski report (or whatever your thing is) as a "thank you" to yourself for the free mentorship :)
It's not a hard choice for Debian to make - they just put it in non-free with thousands of other packages.
Restrictions which he clearly has no willingness to actually enforce. So they only serve to make life hard for the decent folks.
> It's not a hard choice for Debian to make - they just put it in non-free with thousands of other packages.
Sure, but that then has other consequences - they can't use it as a dependency in their build system, they have to move downstream stuff into contrib or look for replacement dependencies, ....
I would not want my work to end up being used by weapons manufacturers[0]. I honestly would like to put this into licenses. But there would be endless kvetching at such a license being used, of course. But so much OSS tooling is relying on how we have ended up with a lot of mutual compatible licenses, and having any sort of weirdness ends up excluding you from being bundled in repros.
There is a line that could be crossed here (and has been crossed by more than one very large project!), and I get ... annoyed at 'licenses' like the WTFPL. But when people get frustrated at seeing American companies deploy tooling to help with things like mass censorship in authoritarian regimes, I think about how we might be a couple license changes away from making that job way harder.
[0]: Not making a blanket statement for people working there! I simply do not want to participate.
But his immediate reaction being the thought of abusing the license was irritating. I can't say that I have never thought this way (of using "free" software, licenses be damned) when I was younger & in school. But as the owner of legitimate business, it seems so perverse. It screws small creators and discourages them from sharing their work with everyone.
[0]: https://codedocs.org/what-is/douglas-crockford [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170722132351/https://dev.hasen...
Whether or not there's a more definitive source I haven't investigated.
Discussed at the time: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866> (56 comments).
Rather than trying to find a job that doesn't involve evil.
Edit: I guess there’s that TV show “Evil”. It would be funny if IBM had that production company as a client.
Indeed, which is why lawyers won’t want to take the risk.
I’m sure they wouldn’t want to use software whose license claims you can’t “hooblepop shanglefronks” either, for that matter, without discussing with the owner to clarify what that means.
Essentially the practical meaning of this license is “this can’t be used by companies with careful lawyers who take license terms seriously”, which I doubt was the intent.