People may make light of this, but as the dzone.com article points out, it's what's known as a Field of Use limitation [1], and it's an actual problem.
The "good" vs "evil" thing is perhaps a red herring, but you can imagine the practical consequences if "free" software developers licensed their work for all purposes except competitors, etc.
The Free Software Foundation raised this issue in the context of royalty-free patent licenses years ago [2], and the Open Source Initiative went so far as to say that if a license allowed for a "Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" then it wasn't an open source license at all [3].
I'm sure D. Crockford didn't do this to be malicious in any way, likely he even did it just to be cute, (maybe he even meant well by it!), but it's also a shame that it's persisted this long, as it sets a bad example for others.
What a rotten shame that an author decided what he did or didn’t want others to do with the fruit of his labours. As you point out, this sets a bad example for others.
Seriously? He’s an adult, he makes his choices, if it means people prefer other, fully free software that doesn’t necessitate lawerly wrangling, so what?
His software isn’t free, and I’m fine with that, he did the work, he decides what we can or cannot do with it.
Sure, but his making this choice means that his work is incompatible with the much larger body of already-established work. His decision is his own, but it's a direction I wouldn't want others to follow, since we all benefit more from the common adoption of a smaller handful of mutually compatible open source licenses.
(Being legally allowed to remix code across projects is one of the great things about the OSI model. There are some silos within open source, such as copyleft vs permissive licenses, but at least each of those are already big enough sustain their own ecosystems.)
Comments
People may make light of this, but as the dzone.com article points out, it's what's known as a Field of Use limitation [1], and it's an actual problem.
The "good" vs "evil" thing is perhaps a red herring, but you can imagine the practical consequences if "free" software developers licensed their work for all purposes except competitors, etc.
The Free Software Foundation raised this issue in the context of royalty-free patent licenses years ago [2], and the Open Source Initiative went so far as to say that if a license allowed for a "Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor" then it wasn't an open source license at all [3].
I'm sure D. Crockford didn't do this to be malicious in any way, likely he even did it just to be cute, (maybe he even meant well by it!), but it's also a shame that it's persisted this long, as it sets a bad example for others.
What a rotten shame that an author decided what he did or didn’t want others to do with the fruit of his labours. As you point out, this sets a bad example for others.
Seriously? He’s an adult, he makes his choices, if it means people prefer other, fully free software that doesn’t necessitate lawerly wrangling, so what?
His software isn’t free, and I’m fine with that, he did the work, he decides what we can or cannot do with it.
http://raganwald.posterous.com/the-freedom-to-drink-coffee
Sure, but his making this choice means that his work is incompatible with the much larger body of already-established work. His decision is his own, but it's a direction I wouldn't want others to follow, since we all benefit more from the common adoption of a smaller handful of mutually compatible open source licenses.
(Being legally allowed to remix code across projects is one of the great things about the OSI model. There are some silos within open source, such as copyleft vs permissive licenses, but at least each of those are already big enough sustain their own ecosystems.)
Tricky tricky. Is it evil to release software that may not be used for evil?
If so, would that make it illegal to redistribute code with a license like this?