Using JSLint For Evil (2011, 2m44s)

Douglas Crockford does a 3 minute stand-up bit about the infamous JSON license.

Humor aside[1], I did find this pretty thought provoking. I've been exposed to a lot of complaining about the JSON license (see also: You May Finally Use JSHint for Evil), but at the end of the day - if you stray away from the JSON license because you think you might be doing something qualifying as "evil"... mission accomplished?

Now, there are obvious counterarguments there, which until now I just blindly accepted.

For example, I like Debian. I think it's a good project, it's worthwhile to have your software in there, so it's bad to use a license that Debian deems "non-free"... but then, do I really support that part of Debian? I don't really like the "zeroth" freedom in the first place, so why am I using a distro that takes such a hard stance on it? I've implicitly accepted this stance due to the other things I like about Debian, but it might be worth rethinking.

This is not to say that it's a good license by any means; sure, it sounds nice that people won't be able to use some software if they do something that someone else could call "evil", right until you actually think about that for a few more seconds.

[1] I didn't tag this with satire because it's not really satire, this just has a really light tone.