
Douglas Crockford: The JSON Saga [video] - vladocar
http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/08/11/video-crockford-json/
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jacobolus
40 minutes into this talk is the best bit (watch the 3 minutes between 40" and
43" even if you don’t care about javascript or JSON). My shouted question from
the audience is inaudible, but they included a transcript:

\--------

 _When I put the reference implementation onto the website, I needed to put a
software license on it. I looked up all the licenses that are available, and
there were a lot of them. I decided the one I liked the best was the MIT
license, which was a notice that you would put on your source, and it would
say: "you're allowed to use this for any purpose you want, just leave the
notice in the source, and don't sue me." I love that license, it's really
good._

 _But this was late in 2002, we'd just started the War On Terror, and we were
going after the evil-doers with the President, and the Vice-President, and I
felt like I need to do my part._

 _[laughter]_

 _So I added one more line to my license, which was: "The Software should be
used for Good, not Evil." I thought I'd done my job. About once a year I'll
get a letter from a crank who says: "I should have a right to use it for
evil!"_

 _[laughter]_

 _"I'm not going to use it until you change your license!" 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 going to use it." Great, it's
working. My license works, I'm stopping the evil doers!_

 _Audience member: If you ask for a separate license, can you use it for
evil?_

 _Douglas: That's an interesting point. Also about once a year, I get a letter
from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company – I don't want to
embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their initials –
IBM…_

 _[laughter]_

 _…saying that they want to use something I wrote. Because I put this on
everything I write, now. They want to use something that I wrote in something
that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for
evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give
them a special license for that?_

 _Of course. So I wrote back – this happened literally two weeks ago – "I give
permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for
evil."_

 _[laughter and applause]_

 _And the attorney wrote back and said: "Thanks very much, Douglas!"_

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blasdel
"Fortunately nobody listens to Dave Winer"

Thankfully that's been true most of the time -- a world in which anyone but
him used Frontier is not one in which I want to live. But a few of his
clusterfucks did slip out: XML-RPC, SOAP, his epic mismanagement of RSS (which
only ended with a headshot from Atom).

The man singlehandedly set the web's progress back about a decade! If not for
him, the nightmare of WS-* would not have existed -- the likes of Microsoft
and IBM would have done something stupid in a big way, but they wouldn't have
pretended it had anything to do with the web.

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brandonkm
Netscape 4 was indeed a crime against humanity. Great video and very
informative. I always enjoy Douglas Crockford's talks.

