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Comment by jcfields | Hacker News Reader

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.

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As an admirer of the WTFPL it's hard to sympathize. The lawyers can still play their games in court, it's free software either way. The fact that a couple central entities get to decide what qualifies as 'real' open source is the most concerning part.

WTFPL isn't ambiguous though.

Yep. WTFPL, while profane, is unambiguous in its permissivity. It is perhaps ill-advised in its lack of a warranty disclaimer, but that's a problem for the developer, not for the end user.

There’s a couple of other central entities which do actually decide what gets to qualify as a legally binding agreement and the WTFPL likely falls short of pleasing them.

>The lawyers can still play their games in court, it's free software either way.

That isn't true at all. If someone takes GCC, makes some changes and re-releases GCCv2 as closed source, there's no open source boogeyman that will force GCCv2 developers to release their code. It's up to courts, and by extension lawyers. Free software implicitly depends on lawyers to hold up the contract of Free Software.

If lawyers tell you "this contract is unusable because of this clause" then you don't have free software, you have a weird proprietary license. The entire point of free software licenses is to define rules for lawyers to play "their games in court". It's worthless otherwise.

IMO, the fact that lawyers can't even agree on the scope of the AGPL means that semantics are just that, semantics.

Many licenses haven't been tried in court, including the AGPL, yet it's used fairly broadly.

AGPL is widely avoided by corporations precisely because of this problem...

Corporations vastly prefer BSD/MIT style licenses or at most GPLv2.

GPLv3 is avoided, AGPL is avoided even more.

AGPL is avoided because cloud/server corporations know exactly what it means. It's expressly written to ban their business models.

Likewise for GPLv3 and Tivoized corporations.

The license JSHint is moving to is MIT. It is by far the most common license used in OSS libraries and it allows usage or re-licensing in proprietary software.

That is the context from which I'm speaking, where enforcing openness through legal means is not a concern as the license is permissive (I imagine you were thinking of protecting GPL software, which is kind of the opposite situation). There have been zero court cases involving legal dispute over MIT licensed software.

Right, the unmodified MIT license is fine. There haven't been any cases precisely because of how unambiguous it is in giving permission.

The question is, how do I know that a contributor to software under the JSLint license (perhaps a corporation that paid an employee to contribute something) won't sue me on the grounds that I'm doing evil with their code?

It is not free software.

To quote https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

"The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose"

Do no evil is maybe tounge in check, but its a real issue when people put things in licenses like "nobody from USA gov is allowed to use"

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