Comment by js4ever 2 days ago
Congratulations for the launch! Also I never heard of that license before:
"LICENSE - DON'T DO EVIL" https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red?tab=License-1-ov-file#...
Also I recommend you to put screenshots higher in the readme and also provide real world use case instead of fully abstract examples
You should absolutely use whatever license you want but the actual price tag a nonstandard license adds is 'far fewer people will be able to try or contribute to your project'. Which might be totally ok for your purposes, just pointing it out since many people who dabble in 'license as messaging' for fun aren't aware of the impact/implications.
This has become clear since I started using the license, fortunately what I do is so niche that few contribute :)
I understand the implications but I also don't like big-tech to stealing my code and leaving me out in the cold. In sense, this license is a snub of the wall-gardens that big-tech has become. This software is something that they can't simple integrate into their product and sell on for profit. It stays out of the wall gardens.
It's a cool license in that it triggered Google enough to bar the use of jslint and led IBM's lawyers to seek out a special exemption to allow them and their customers to use JSON for evil.
No company's PR will ever tell you what the soul of a company is like but their lawyers will indirectly tell you everything.
Plenty (in not most) legal cases hinge upon non specifically defined terms hence lot of lawyering is not "this is definitely legal/illegal" but "what's the risk of this going wrong if we face a jury?"
Companies take tens of thousands of legal risks every day and they single out particular risks over others to try and indemnify themselves because they think that risk is serious.
Theyre not going to admit that theyre worried that the company is evil enough to qualify under a reasonable person's interpretation but thats what theyre thinking.
It's the same with your employment contract. The level of nasty bullshit they put in there ("lawyers made us!") is probably the most accurate meter of how horrible (or not) the company will be towards you as an employer.
Now I'm on the fence about adding philosophy to software licenses, even if only in a joking way. It can be fun and even thought provoking, but it could get in the way of genuine business adoption for basically no return (you never know if it helps influence anyone for the better, and most likely it doesn't).
Any license that isn't a word-for-word match to one of the "approved" licenses can potentially trigger a need for legal review, depending on the enterprise. Lawyers are expensive so quirky licenses can be a deal-killer for any customers who take licenses seriously.
If you want to be funny, put an easter egg in your code, don't mess with your license.
Easter eggs in code that break things are evil!
I don't write code for corporates, so my license is purely fictive. I cannot enforce my license but I can prevent corporates from taking my code and wrapping it into a product and selling it on for a profit. While not passing on a cent to me.
If a corporate wishes to use my code, then they are welcome to pay me a license fee or a one-off payment for a non-distributable license.
My inspiration was came from Douglas Crockford and the JSONlint[1] license.
Why not have a message? I mean if big-tech won't use my software because they legally think they might do evil with it, so be it.
Do I really want big-tech to wrap my software into a product and sell it for profit while not giving me a cent because what I did was share my code without strings attached?
I don't know. I would like to make this place just that little bit better and if if that's a license that makes folks think about what is evil, heck why not!
[1] https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38...
> Or they'll write to me and say, "how do I know if it's evil or not? I don't think it's evil, but someone else might think it's evil, so I'm not gonna use it."
> Great. It's working. My license works. I'm stopping the evildoers.
Or cautiously logical people who are probably doing good but don't have an absolute certainty that they are, which is probably the best way to live.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll move the examples up and add a link to a running instance.
The license is a reminder that open source software isn’t free, in this case, I would like folks to think about what is evil. That’s the price tag.
The license isn’t enforceable and won’t be enforced.