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I suspect that quite a few people wanted to use it for projects that had a high likelihood of being considered "evil" by some people, so while the licensing restriction is ridiculous, I wonder if it didn't actually serve its intended purpose? (I'm thinking DoD/intel stuff primarily).


It's not just a matter of being ridiculous, it's a matter of being unenforceable and impossible to comply with. If I created an open source project that used a "no evil" library then how am I supposed to restrict the actions of my users? How do we even define "evil" (which has no legal definition)?

That last bit is the tough one. Some people define homosexuality as evil, others define it with things like women going to school. DC obviously isn't that extreme, but he's using a term in a legal setting that can be defined by different people in completely different ways. This makes it so no business can use this code, and even things like open source projects should be extremely weary.

What this essentially did was allow Douglas Crockford to claim that he open sourced his code while actually keeping it closed and forcing people to go through him if they actually wanted to legally use it. While I'm sure plenty of people use it regardless, there's nothing preventing DC from simply stepping in and forcing them to stop. If he had used a real open source license that would be impossible, but as it stands all he has to do is walk over and say "I consider that evil" and you need to rip his library out.

This isn't just hypothetical. I had to remove code from an open source project because of this. It's why I wrote JShrink, as an open source replacement for the JSMin libary. https://github.com/tedivm/JShrink


As Richelieu said "Give me six lines written by the most honourable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him."

I pay US taxes and the US government kills people around the world. They also subsidise farmers which puts others around the world at a disadvantage contributing to poorer economic circumstances for them. The US incarcerates a large number of people. If the project benefited me or anyone else paying US taxes, then hasn't it benefited the US government, and hence evil?


I moved far away from family and friends to stop paying US taxes for exactly these reasons.

Vote with your tax dollars.




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