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Comment by perihelions

1 year ago

- "It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses,"

Yes, but aside from jokes[0] it's unprecedented for an OSS license to attempt to restrain the purposes for which end-users use software. That's incompatible with the definition of free software ("free", as in "freedom").

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSLint#License

- "Before that, the JSLint license[4] was a derivative of the MIT License.[5] The sole modification was the addition of the line "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."

- "According to the Free Software Foundation, this previous clause made the original license non-free."

This is in the definition of open-source too. Software that restricts the purposes for which people use it isn’t free or open source.