Hacker News Reader

No, I'm saying that will not solve the perceived problem.

I suggest more information, such as "Be aware that this software is licensed under a custom license. Click here to view the license."

I don't think the author of the article suggests that evil should be allowed, but that it is very hard to define evil, and that this clause makes the license non-free software.

View on HN

It honestly would not be that difficult to implement something like this. Both the OSI and FSF maintain lists of "approved" licenses along with standard license text. In fact, Pivotal Labs has created a tool along these lines for Ruby: https://github.com/pivotal/LicenseFinder , and the Leiningen project tool from Clojure allows for licenses to be specified in a machine parseable format: https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/blob/master/sample.... .

I agree with you here. But the software is $free, just now for available to everyone, and "non-free" in the FSF definition of "free".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com