Comment by jahewson
13 years ago
It's sad that Crockford thinks that causing this kind of hassle to diligent users of his software is funny.
Ha ha, stupid user, you took the legally binding joke which I inserted into a legally binding license seriously, hahah you sooo funny.
Yeah, a real barrel of laughs. Never mind that licensing law is a lot less flexible than contract law, in which unreasonable terms are readily removed.
It's sad that Crockford wrote a piece of code and gave it away for free in such a way that some people feel they can't use it? How much sadder than all the code every YC company writes and doesn't publish at all?
The problem is that the code on json.org is almost free software, and easily mistaken as such.
If others are encouraged to make similar "jokes," yes.
So, just to be clear, your take is that the authors of software are not in fact entitled to use whatever license they please?
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Ugh, startup code, be glad they don't push all that crap up to Github. I'm more than happy that most sane contributors to open source have a filter on. Not every piece of internal code is needed or wanted be the community.
Kind of a lame and unnecessary rip on YC?
Sure, if you're hypersensitive or just looking for a fight. I like a lot of YC companies.
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Well, those diligent users can reimplement the software if they don't like it. It's only the implementation that's got that clause, not the spec.
Obviously that's not easy for them to do, but nobody says they have to use his implementation if they don't like the terms it's licensed under.
You're painting a picture of a way out that doesn't exist for most people (reverse straw man?). When it's about a library on which a lot of software depends then the common non-programmer has had absolutely no choice about this and cannot re-implement either.
Right, but that's not the fault of the original author. He licensed his code a particular way, and everyone else has the choice to either use it or not. I don't like the attitude of blaming him simply because lots of other people came to depend on it without realising that it's less free than some of them might have liked.
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What would most people do if the software just didn't exist?
Luckily JSON 3 exists! http://bestiejs.github.com/json3/
Writing OpenSource software used to be a real of real amateurs, people who do it because they love to do that stuff and derive fun out of it. Now, it seems, the license has become the most important aspect in this.
IMHO, this is a most unfortunate development, sadly driven by license fundamentalists like Debian. It is high time that someone like Crockford throws a fistful of sand in those gears and causes butthurt. Maybe this will cause at least some people to start thinking again instead blindly following the perceived neccessities of some special OSS project.
And yes, if the Debian folk are this worried, it should be a matter of days to invent "GNU JSON (now with a proper LICENSE so we can kiss more enterprise ass)"
"license fundamentalists" ...? You mean, "people trying to obey the law and not get sued"?
Wake me when Crockford gets sued for his "license".
Seems like a real, major user requested a clarification / amendment to their software license in order to use the software. Crockford granted such a clarification / amendment. I don't see the problem here.
Software is written and licensed by people, and is susceptible to their quirks and foibles.
The solution for the anti-joke contingent is to organize a mass flood of exemption requests for Crockford to deal with.
He isn't obliged to even answer them :-) That's just a courtesy and if abused he might just as well say “take it under the license as is or don't; I won't make exceptions anymore”.
Software licensing is already a joke - he's just being honest about it.