{"slug": "crockford-on-json-license", "title": "crockford-on-json-license", "summary": "Douglas Crockford explains that he chose the MIT License for his JSON reference implementation but added the clause \"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil\" in 2002. He notes that this clause has caused some individuals and companies, including IBM, to request special permission to use his software for potentially \"evil\" purposes. Crockford states that he grants such permissions, as he did for IBM and its affiliates, to use JSLint for evil.", "body_md": "crockford-on-json-license\n\n      This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.\n      \nLearn more about bidirectional Unicode characters\n\n \n    Show hidden characters\n\nhttps://youtu.be/-C-JoyNuQJs?t=39m45s\n\nWhen I put the reference implementation onto the website I needed to\n\nput a software license on it.\n\nAnd I looked at all the licenses that were available, and there were a lot\n\nof them. And I decided that the one I liked the best was the MIT License,\n\nwhich was a notice that you would put on your source and it would say,\n\n\"you're allowed to use this for any purpose you want, just leave the\n\nnotice in the source and don't sue me.\"\n\nI love that license.  It's really good.\n\nBut this was late in 2002, you know, we'd just started the war on terror,\n\nand, you know, we were going after the evildoers with the president and\n\nthe vice president, and I felt like, \"I need to do my part\".\n\nSo I added one more line to my license, was that, \"the Software shall\n\nbe used for Good, not Evil.\"  And thought: I've done my job!\n\nAbout once a year I'll get a letter from a crank who says, \"I should\n\nhave a right to use it for evil! I'm not gonna use it until you change\n\nyour license!\"\n\nOr they'll write to me and say, \"how do I know if it's evil or not? I\n\ndon't think it's evil, but someone else might think it's evil, so I'm\n\nnot gonna use it.\"\n\nGreat. It's working. My license works. I'm stopping the evildoers.\n\n...\n\nAlso about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a\n\ndifferent lawyer, at a company. I don't want to embarrass the company by\n\nsaying their name, so I'll just say their initials, \"IBM,\" saying that\n\nthey want to use something that I wrote, 'cause I put this on everything\n\nI write now. They want to use something that I wrote and something that\n\nthey wrote and they're pretty sure they weren't gonna use it for evil,\n\nbut they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So, could I give\n\nthem a special license for that?\n\nSo, of course!\n\nSo I wrote back---this happened literally two weeks ago---I said, \"I\n\ngive permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use\n\nJSLint for evil.\"\n\nAnd the attorney wrote back and said, \"Thanks very much, Douglas!\"", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/crockford-on-json-license", "canonical_source": "https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38fe47076", "published_at": "2018-08-31 21:16:22+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-23 21:34:07.114848+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["open-source"], "entities": ["Douglas Crockford", "JSON", "MIT License"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/crockford-on-json-license", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/crockford-on-json-license.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/crockford-on-json-license.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/crockford-on-json-license.jsonld"}}