Etherpad includes banned (on Google code) software JSMin

http://wonko.com/post/etherpad-source-includes-jsmin

by suprgeek • 17 years ago

75 58 17 years ago

wonko.com

xal3• 17 years ago

Stuff like this is why we slap MIT_LICENSE on everything we release so we never hear about licensing again.

It's just a silly situation that arises from a silly change to the license.

madair3• 17 years ago

Some people actually don't want their code to be used for evil. Glad MIT works for you though.

Tichy• 17 years ago

It might be impossible for code to not be usable for evil. If you are programming an online shop, you kill physical shops (evil). If you program a game, you are stealing people's time (evil). If you program a social network, you tempt people to expose too much of themselves on the net (evil). There are always two sides to things.

pmorici2• 17 years ago

Good and Evil are one in the same it just depends which side you are on. Sure there are some clear cut things like clubbing babies, obviously evil. but what if I run a internet scam site that uses all it's profits to run free medical clinics in the third world and saves hundreds of lives? Point being it's subjective, hence only you can decide what is good and evil for yourself and putting a clause like that in your license is meaningless.

xal3• 17 years ago

The point is that it's impossible to tell what is Evil and what is Good. It entirely depends on your point of reference.

We release about 40% of Shopify's code base as open source. There are numerous knockoffs both closed source and open source that use all of our open source ( and even our themes, templates, js and css! ) to make competing products. This sucks for us and is certainly evil from our perspective but it's silly to change a battle hardened OSI license to prevent people from doing that.

enneff• 17 years ago

But this license doesn't prevent that from happening, anyway. Anyone truly evil would just ignore that clause.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

This is not unique to Google. I've got a friend at MetaCarta who really wanted to use JSMin, but the legal department squashed it immediately because the phrase "This software shall be used for Good, not for Evil" could mean anything in a court of law.

Basically any corporate entity with a legal department worth its salt will say the same thing.

It's a shame, really, because JSMin and JSLint are nice pieces of software and the intent behind it is admirable, but the way our legal system works, that clause has prevented much good that could otherwise have been accomplished.

madair3• 17 years ago

Just because a legal department says something doesn't make it true. This is not tested in a court of law, and law departments have varying standards and interpretations. Some even have guts. Some prefer themselves not to do evil.

But if you're Raytheon, Haliburton, the U.S. Military, or one of the mercenary step-children of Blackwater then yeah, maybe your legal department is wise to balk.

pavs• 17 years ago

People have been sued for more stupid reasons.

adamc• 17 years ago

Legal departments get paid to keep you out of trouble, which means vague and untested wording is seen as a risk.

rgrove4• 17 years ago

This headline is misleading taken out of context, and is not the headline of the linked blog post (I'm the author). JSMin isn't "banned software", it's just not allowed on Google Code.

suprgeek2• 17 years ago

Modified headline to reflect that it is "banned" on Google code and not in general. JSMin is indeed very good.

rgrove4• 17 years ago

Much better, thanks.

nailer• 17 years ago

Saying that JSMin is banned still implies JSmin itself ws explicitly banned, which is not correct.

It would be better to say 'non Open Source' as that's the reason why JSmin, Microsoft Windows and other apps for which you can get source code but aren't OSS aren't allowed on Google Code.

JoelMcCracken• 17 years ago

I don't see anything wrong with this. The license terms are very ambiguous. Honestly, what is "evil", and if you can define it, you deserve a phd in philosophy.

Point being, if you release something under a license that is is too obscure and free, you will run into these problems, as Google has. I mean, they operate in China, after all. (not that I have anything against China. The citizens of the United States of America could learn from China).

rgrove4• 17 years ago

The point isn't whether it's right or wrong. It's that Google made a rule (no JSMin/JSLint on Google Code), then (unintentionally) broke it themselves with Etherpad and a few other projects, and must now deal with the consequences.

To their credit, they are actually dealing with the consequences and not setting a double standard, which I find admirable. But I still think the situation is worth highlighting and worth discussing.

blasdel2• 17 years ago

JSMin's license is simply MIT + this added clause:

  The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

Google Code takes a hard stance against license proliferation, and only allows the ones on their minimized list, period.

I think Hipp took a better approach with Sqlite -- the code is in the public domain, and instead of a license the code comes with headers containing this simple admonition/blessing:

  May you do good and not evil
  May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others
  May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

alextgordon• 17 years ago

Richard Hipp actually said that he wished he hadn't released SQLite into the public domain. Apparently it becomes a headache when the code is used in countries that don't have the same implementation of the public domain as the US (around 16 minutes in: http://www.viddler.com/explore/rentzsch/videos/25/ ).

I think that if you want to appease legal departments, your best bet is a well known licence, written by lawyers (eg Apache 2.0).

blasdel2• 17 years ago

Yes, Moral Rights are even more of a pain in the ass than the AGPL could ever hope to be.

whalesalad• 17 years ago

Why can't JSMin simply remove that from their license and save a lot of people a lotta headache?

madair3• 17 years ago

Maybe he prefers that JSMin code not show up in Hellfire missiles?

ique2• 17 years ago

Who says it wont? If the hellfire missiles is used to kill terrorists plotting to nuke the world I would say they were used for good!

The license statement is just ridiculous and doesn't mean anything at all, yet it gives legal departments everywhere a big problem to deal with.

dagw2• 17 years ago

If that was the goal then they could simply add a provision that the code could not be used in any military projects or projects by military subcontractors. That would also be a lot easier to uphold in court than trying to define 'evil'.

ElliotH• 17 years ago

But who defines 'evil'? A hellfire missile kills, and maybe your stance is that killing is evil full stop (this is purely hypothetical - I have no idea what your views actually are) but maybe someone else thinks that firing missiles at an invasive force to their country is 'Good' and the killing is in this case justified.

ryandvm• 17 years ago

As many others have pointed out, "good" and "evil" are completely subjective. And judging from your naitivity, I am quite sure that even you and I would have differing interpretations. I believe a Hellfire missile can, in fact, be used for "good". The clause is obviously worthless.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

Crockford talks about this problem here: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford...

They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that?

Of course. So I wrote back – this happened literally two weeks ago – "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

Pretty funny, if you ask me.

suprgeek2• 17 years ago

Wonderful. So JSMin will still be used by IBM, Crockford gets to illustrate how divorced Legal Speak is from Regular Speak, and pokes some (well deserved) fun at "IBM and its Minions". Win-Win

Retric• 17 years ago

The RPGer in me finds it amusing that they did not ask for you to extent that to "neutral" acts.

anthonyb• 17 years ago

I find it amusing that he only licensed it to IBM and minions for small-e evil, not big-E Evil.

oujheush• 17 years ago

Neutral in this license appears to be in a gray area. The initial phrase "for Good, not Evil" presents a dichotomy. Now, this addendum allows Evil as well. So the license has never explicitly addressed this issue, it seems like it would depend on what else the license says.

Assuming that the license this is added to is a generally permissive license, I would assume that neutral acts are implicitly allowed and were probably not enjoined by "for Good, not Evil" as that clause would simply not have applied.

But I am not a lawyer.

lsb• 17 years ago

It's an unfortunate aspect of IBM's legacy that they supplied the Third Reich with computer supplies (those numbers branded into people's arms are IBM database ids), and they also partnered with apartheid South Africa to supply them with technology.

See http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/ and http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM for starters; the last one has a rather distressing paragraph:

One of the medals Watson received was from the Nazi government in 1937, honoring him in his role as the President of the International Chamber of Commerce. During the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of World War II, Watson and IBM’s German subsidiary had relationships and contracts with the German military/industrial technocracy. IBM's punch card machines were used by Germany to keep track of people who were to be subjected to the Holocaust.[8] Only after Jews were identified—a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately—could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed. But IBM's Hollerith punch card technology did exist. IBM and its German subsidiary custom-designed complex solutions, one by one, anticipating the Reich's needs. They did not merely sell the machines and walk away. Instead, IBM leased these machines for high fees and became the sole source of the billions of punch cards Hitler needed.

gojomo• 17 years ago

If some creators want to be whimsical in their license text, of course that's their prerogative.

But it does create a bit of a mess for people who take certain principles in their work as seriously as these programmers care about their craft and personal expression.

License text is code, of a sort, and overall it's a good thing that large organizations care about the precise meaning of the legal agreements they enter into.

Similarly, it's a good thing that the 'Open Source Definition' says licenses can't discriminate against fields of endeavor (including those some would label 'evil') and still be considered 'open source'.

So this little license flourish throws a couple of monkeywrenches into the gears for well-meaning folks just trying to get good stuff done.

Perhaps it succeeds as a thought-provoking bit of performance art, but it's lousy as a license term for enabling sharing and building.

Kadin• 17 years ago

It's a pretty stupid line to put in a license. What the hell does it even mean? Without defining "evil" in the context of the license, it could mean anything -- who gets to decide what constitutes "evil"? The original author? In that case, it's like making the license immediately revocable for any reason at any point in the future.

It's understandable that Google, or just about anyone else, would reject a license with that sort of vague language in it.

There's a time and place for whimsy, but a software license isn't it.

oomkiller• 17 years ago

How childish of him. Attorneys will quibble over anything, he needs to either remove the offending text from the license, and use the FREE Google Code, or host it himself and quit complaining about Google's legal policies. He is going to either lose lots of software where his code is used, or make it a lot harder on the community.

RyanGWU82• 17 years ago

It's not his call. He forked a derivative of Douglas Crawford's JSmin project, and that was a requirement in Crawford's license.

neilc2• 17 years ago

The whole thing is silly, because JSmin is ~200 lines of code. It would be trivial to rewrite from scratch and avoid the braindamaged license.

motters• 17 years ago

I'm not sure that Good and Evil have legal definitions. Also people doing evil often seem to believe they're doing good, so could claim full compliance.

neilc2• 17 years ago

Last week, Google banned my PHP port of JSMin from Google Code due to a quibble over a line in the license stating that “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil”, which they believe makes the license non-free.

It probably does make the software non-free (e.g. according to the DSFG); more importantly, such a clause is utterly idiotic. Rather than bitching about Google Code, the JSMin author would be better served to get rid of the arbitrary, subjective and probably unenforceable clause from the license. The original JSMin is only 200 lines of C, so the simple solution would just be a from-scratch rewrite.

ghempton• 17 years ago

github ftw

Etherpad includes banned (on Google code) software JSMin

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