This gave me a brilliant idea:
- Everyone adds a clause to whatever license they use stating “any part of this software may not be used for was purposes of any kind”
- We wait until software with these licences is spread across the supply chain of everything on Earth
- …
- World peace, as no country would be legally allowed to wage war
Every Villain Is Lemons
E.V.I.L
This is peak licensing
Wait I though the point of these post-opensource clauses (see also: anti-capitalist licence, WTFPL, etc.) was to scare off the big corporations lawyers and make sure your code won’t end up in AWS or something like that? Are Linux distros the only actors who are still giving a shit about licencing?
If you want to scare corporations use AGPL or, if you’re feeling spicy, SSPL. Do not use WTFPL, it’s too permissive.
https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy/
AGPL policy: Don’t use.
Always were.
Big companies care too but only of their cya arm knows enough about software to actually enforce anything. A lot don’t.
can we please pronounce that evil in a British accent: ivil
OK but how can json have a license? I understand a particular json parser having a license, but how can a specification, which contains no code, even be considered “software”?
Uh define code there. What about when storage and code are both on a machine that considers both instructions and data to be data? Is a spec not a creative work? Is code not just a spec?
It’s generally accepted that file formats aren’t protected IP, so you can write a compatible reader or writer and be in the clear as long as you reused no code from the original reader/writer. The specification may have licence terms that restrict who you can share the spec with, but you don’t necessarily need the official spec to come up with a compatible implementation. Plenty of file formats have been reverse engineered over the years even when the original didn’t have a written spec.
The question on stack overflow: PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function json_decode()
As a php user, this is hilarious.
The issue shouldn’t effect any php users today, as this is a issue with older versions of PHP 5.5, where the “outdated PHP 5.6” was released in 2014.
Anything on PHP 5.6 has been a security risk for half a decade already. So this is like if you were on Ubuntu 14, or Windows 8. If you have problems, it might be you.
The biggest problem with such a clause is that it is hard to define “evil”, even if it seems clear to you. Some people think that abortion is evil, so are abortion clinics banned from Json? What about the military and weapon manufacturers? Killing is evil, but you all know how the discourse about the military as national heroes that can’t be evil in the US goes. What about a service like X - is it evil? Can you define “evil” for a surveillance tool that brands itself as ad tech?
Every person should act according to their own morals.
There would be so much violence in the world if they did.
The clause also states that the product MUST be used for Good, which is a higher bar. I’d imagine most things JSON is used for are fairly morally neutral.
Space cops
I’d imagine most things JSON is used for are fairly morally neutral.
a lawsuit waiting to happen. Json has been a real dick lately sending his lawyers after everyone
Yeah I would imagine this is the point
Ask every single person what is the definition of evil and merge all the answers into one definition
The law is basically this, it’s why nearly everyone hates the government.
That’d be all the things.
You’d end up with Schrödinger’s Evil
I’ll be downloading this one
So do you use JSON for your endpoints?
No we use XML
Oh interesting why is that?
Uhhh…no reason
Well SOAP is inherently evil so that just makes sense
At least it’s not GraphQL
GraphQL saved my ass on a term project that required extensive polling of the GitHub API. Turned a calculated 47 days of calls just under the rate limit into just 12 hours.
I work with SOAP for a legacy API
fucking kill me, I beg you
No can do, but I can put you in an envelope, head optional.
What happens is that engineers look at a technology and say, this is too complex, I just need something simple. So they invent and/or adopt something simpler than the popular technology of the day.
But as they build more and more things using the technology, they realize that it needs more features, so those get added on. This happens over and over again to the technology with more and more features being added to it, until a new set of engineers look at it and say this is too complex, I just need something simple…
You’ve just described what is probably the most well-known xkcd comic in a somewhat long-winded fashion.
Slightly different though.
Everybody gangsta with the “don’t be evil” clause until the authors turn out to be a nutjob who thinks trans people are blights against God and must be exterminated.
I doubt (or at least hope) that that’s not what they think, but hopefully that illustrates why the clause is dumb.
100%, and it doesn’t seem to lay out a legal definition of “good” so it’s actually worse than useless - it’s ambiguous.
The FSF also lists any software as non-free which uses the beer license (use the software in any way you want, and should you ever meet the author, pay them a beer).
Is it really contrarian to like the FSF these days? I mean people seem to hate Stallman too but both are pretty important in the history and continuing existence of free software.
The four essential freedoms are in my view as important as the FSF says, and any license that doesn’t meet all four will be met with skepticism from me absolutely.
Also, the GPL is a real, legal license, and even if there’s a silly clause that causes it to be incompatible, that’s still a legal liability - of course they have to take it seriously.
I can’t stand beer - is there a rum & Coke license?
I thought it was free as in speech not free as in beer? So if it costs a beer then isn’t it still free (as in speech)? Or is this a OSI vs FSF difference?
According to the FSF, it’s only free if you tell people what they can do with it, but only very specific things
You’re allowed to charge before you give access to the software, but then can’t restrict the people you give it to giving it to more people. The beer licence sounds like those people would be on the hook for beer, too.
I was thinking the same thing, does anyone have any context as to why the Beer license is not considered free? If I’m to guess it probably has something to do with copyleft-restrictions (or lack thereof).
Spoilsports. Next they’ll be telling me I can’t use apple software in the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons.
So if I use it to draw a rocket, I’m violating its license?
I mean… Missiles and rockets aren’t the same thing…
Not every missile is a rocket, but every rocket is a missile.
Exactly
I specifically remember being in elementary school and learning that the school code of conduct disallowed “throwing of missiles” which was a blanket term for any item that the school deemed should not have been thrown including snowballs
Redstone/Mercury has entered the chat
Wow, when did minecraft add other planets?
If its a design for something you plan to build then all your software is going to turn into buggy java applets and Tim Apple will give you a wet willy the next time you’re trying to look cool. It’s right there in the license.
Ah, the ambiguity of words - the definition of “evil” lies in the eye of the beholder.
Well then we just kill all the Beholders and voila, no more evil.
Me buying my first IBM ThinkPad online:
IBM: are you planning to use this ThinkPad to produce weapons of mass destruction?
Me: I wasn’t before, but now I’m curious
How does one address the paradox that, as JSON itself is evil, one cannot use it for evil?
(opinions may vary on the above; but it’s mine, so nyah nyah.)
It’s less evil than XML or YAML
YAML is (mostly) a superset of JSON. Is the face hugger any less evil than the alien bursting out of your chest?
It’s got enough serious flaws and quirks that I can feel smug hating on it. JSON is far from perfect, but overall it’s the least worst of human-readable formats.
Only Python manages to get away with syntactical indentation.
The complaints about yaml’s quirks (
noevaluating tofalse, implicit strings, weird number formats, etc.) are valid in theory but I’ve never encountered them causing any real-life issues.
Hmm, hard to argue with that :P
XML is ok for complex docs where you have a detailed structure and relationships. JSON is good for simple objects. YAML is good for being something to switch to for the illusion of progress.
Meh. I just wish XML was easier to parse. I have to shuttle a lot of XML data back and forth. As far as I can tell, the only way to query the data is to download a whole engine to run a special query language, and that doesn’t really integrate into any of my workflows. JSON retains the hierarchy and is trivially parsed in almost any programming language. I bet a JSON file containing the exact same data would be much smaller also, since you don’t list each tag twice.
It’s still using the lesser of 3 evils, we need a fourth structural markup language.
>TOML has entered the channel
Any human-readable format compatible with JSON is inevitably going to be used as an interchange format…
"Problem: There are
34 standardsObligatory xkcd
