
Why the JSON license is supposedly "non-free" - acangiano
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#JSON
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orangecat
I was at one of Douglas Crockford's presentations on JSON. He mentioned that
IBM had expressed concerns about the license, so he sent them an official
authorization allowing them to use JSON for evil.

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wulczer
Oops, I was in the process of writing a comment about that (with a link) and
only saw yours after I sent mine...

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delano
Please include the link.

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wulczer
Well since I've written that other comment before seeing this, the link is
there, but what the hell, I can repeat it:
<http://dev.hasenj.org/post/3272592502/ibm-and-its-minions>

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wulczer
Yeah, well, hate to be a partybreaker and I personally love that "Goot, not
Evil" clause, but in the world of lawyers jokes do not exist. It's cute, but
for serious software keep the licensing simple.

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knowtheory
That is absolutely not true. There's no bigger fan of jokes and jabs w/in
constraints than lawyers, and judges in particular. I know of several law
schools which have competitions amongst their classes to find the weirdest,
funniest, or most bizarre citation or footnote w/in legal briefs/case law.

There is some _weird_ stuff in our legal system, however they (typically) are
asides amongst the core arguments, or in support of the core arguments of a
legal case.

Remember that good lawyers are hackers. They're trying to find edge cases and
tease at the margins of the representation of the world that has been encoded
in law.

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wulczer
Heh, it might be true, but I'm sure that lawyers that work in software
companies screening the project BigCorp wants to use for potential licensing
problems will share a laugh amongst them, but will then write to the boss
saying: "It's risky, don't use that code".

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knowtheory
Oh, i should make a distinction. Actual litigators have different jobs from
corporate attorneys.

Big corp legal departments are like corporate security teams. They don't want
to see _anything_ that could surprise them, and ideally they're going to lock
your corporate environment down as tightly as they possibly can.

Their job is to make sure no one else can screw with the way they've modeled
the world.

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delano
The ironical part about that entire page is that BSD-style licenses are the
most free of all.

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rbanffy
BSD licenses defend only the freedoms of the developers. GNU-style licenses
defend the freedom of the users by taking away some freedoms from developers.

If you really believe there can be a license that's "most free of all", that
would be public domain (like SQLite).

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delano
Does that decrease net freedom?

Edit: you added the comment about SQLite after I replied. The problem with
public domain is that it's messy. It has a specific legal definition which is
not the same across jurisdictions (and in some places it's not recognized at
all). It's cleaner and more succinct to say, "use this for whatever you want,
including commercial purposes, but don't blame me for any problems".

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rbanffy
Sorry for the edit - I am a strong believer in the "release early and often"
mantra.

I believe that BSD may, in fact, decrease net freedom. With GPL-like licenses,
you always increase the amount of software that's released as free, because no
such software can be closed up. With BSD-ish there is always the chance of one
entity grabbing the software and running with it.

If you consider a win having the largest corpus of software released under a
free license, then GPL is a superior solution, because it restricts no freedom
but the one to close the software.

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delano
Perhaps that's true. The opportunity to generate a profit is a significant
motivator for a lot of people though. That's not true for everyone and those
people will write and release regardless. But for those that it is true, they
will spend time on something they wouldn't otherwise and likely be more
productive doing it.

I don't mind people using the software I write to generate a private profit. I
think there's a greater net benefit in allowing more opportunities for people
to make a living.

