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Comment on Ask HN: Software licensing excluding military use?

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Some old software had BSD license with clause 'do not use for evil'. It was useless for corporate use. 'Evil' has different meaning for each individual and is impossible to define.

This was the case for JSON and JSLint, with a clause of "This Software shall be used for Good, not Evil". Famously, IBM requested (and got) an exception from this.

Yep, the exception was in the form of:

“I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.”

IBM's response:

“Thanks very much, Douglas!”

Just in case anyone else hadn't heard of that and wants to look it up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866

jslint famously had such a clause and caused problems for lots of FLOSS distros like Debian. Please don't include such a clause, it only punishes careful people.

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