Comment by archangel_one
13 years ago
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.
Maybe we don't have to blame him for anything, but we can still have the opinion that he's a childish asshole.
3 replies →
What would most people do if the software just didn't exist?
Luckily JSON 3 exists! http://bestiejs.github.com/json3/