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

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.

How is that evil from anyone's perspective? You released code under a license that said people could do certain things with it. So they did those certain things with it, and you think that's evil? Huh?

(Of course, if people are using the software in ways at odds with your license, you have legal recourse, in which case... why aren't you taking legal action?)

There are a ton of things you can do with our code that isn't actively marketing to our exact customer base. According to numbers we got recently more then 30% of all deployed commercial rails apps use ActiveMerchant which probably means tens of thousands. Only a handful are e-commerce systems.

Sure, but how is that "evil"?

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.

Is your assessment about the subjectivity of good and evil objective?

"There is no such thing as right or wrong." [ ] Right [ ] Wrong

You're conflating the rather abstract and arguably subjective moral concepts of "right" and "wrong" with "true" and "false."

Hah, this made me laugh and think for a moment. Personally, I'm not sure that right and wrong are subjective, but I'm also quite careful about saying there's an objective right and wrong. Objective right and wrong can certainly lead away from "live and let live", and who arbitrates this objective morality when people disagree?

So, funny phrasing and thought provoking way of putting it. After some reflection, I think I'd press you to define right and wrong before answering if you hit me up with that.

Now you've got me wanting to put a clause in my copylefted work that says "This work may be used for Good or Evil, but only by people who acknowledge the difference."

There is a difference if we agree on our frame of reference, ie: what religion / culture / time and place we are drawing our definitions of good and evil from. But given that a piece of open source software is put out there for everyone from any point and time here on forward it's nearly a given that at some point a user is going to evaluate their actions in a different frame of reference and do something that you view as evil and they view as good.

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

It's not that. The problem for someone who wants to use it is that they're entering into a contract with a licensor which commits them to an unknown (and possibly unknowable) compliance regime that they can never be sure they will satisfy.

You could have a license that said 'good for all uses except military ones' - you might or not want to deal with the requirements it imposes, but at least they're very clear cut.

But concepts of good an evil are hopelessly subjective. Besides all the examples already used here, suppose JSMin was employed for some scientific application involving the study of evolution. Well, I think that would be good since I'm a fan of Darwin, but if I were a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim I might consider that absolutely pernicious on the grounds that evolution denies the guidance of God in natural affairs (which some people do believe). Not only do I have to worry whether the author of JSMin might believe this, but anyone else who believes that and see JSMin being employed for this end might take moral offense and file for an injunction to prevent its use. such a suit would probably be thrown out immediately, but who wants to worry about such hassles when they are so easily avoidable?

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.