crockford-on-json-license

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.

crockford-on-json-license 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. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters Show hidden characters https://youtu.be/-C-JoyNuQJs?t=39m45s When I put the reference implementation onto the website I needed to put a software license on it. And I looked at all the licenses that were available, and there were a lot of them. And I decided that the one I liked the best was the MIT License, which was a notice that you would put on your source and it would say, "you're allowed to use this for any purpose you want, just leave the notice in the source and don't sue me." I love that license. It's really good. But this was late in 2002, you know, we'd just started the war on terror, and, you know, we were going after the evildoers with the president and the vice president, and I felt like, "I need to do my part". So I added one more line to my license, was that, "the Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." And thought: I've done my job About once a year I'll get a letter from a crank who says, "I should have a right to use it for evil I'm not gonna use it until you change your license " Or they'll write to me and say, "how do I know if it's evil or not? I don't think it's evil, but someone else might think it's evil, so I'm not gonna use it." Great. It's working. My license works. I'm stopping the evildoers. ... Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company. I don't want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their initials, "IBM," saying that they want to use something that I wrote, 'cause I put this on everything I write now. They want to use something that I wrote and something that they wrote and they're pretty sure they weren't gonna use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So, could I give them a special license for that? So, of course So I wrote back---this happened literally two weeks ago---I said, "I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil." And the attorney wrote back and said, "Thanks very much, Douglas "