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A comment on You may finally use JSHint for evil. Parent comment

Re:You may finally use JSHint for evil by ricardobeat on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @04:41PM (#24054279)
As an admirer of the WTFPL it's hard to sympathize. The lawyers can still play their games in court, it's free software either way. The fact that a couple central entities get to decide what qualifies as 'real' open source is the most concerning part.
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Re:You may finally use JSHint for evil by nemothekid on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @05:06PM (#24054502)
>The lawyers can still play their games in court, it's free software either way.

That isn't true at all. If someone takes GCC, makes some changes and re-releases GCCv2 as closed source, there's no open source boogeyman that will force GCCv2 developers to release their code. It's up to courts, and by extension lawyers. Free software implicitly depends on lawyers to hold up the contract of Free Software.

If lawyers tell you "this contract is unusable because of this clause" then you don't have free software, you have a weird proprietary license. The entire point of free software licenses is to define rules for lawyers to play "their games in court". It's worthless otherwise.

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Re:You may finally use JSHint for evil by falcolas on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @05:20PM (#24054617)
IMO, the fact that lawyers can't even agree on the scope of the AGPL means that semantics are just that, semantics.

Many licenses haven't been tried in court, including the AGPL, yet it's used fairly broadly.

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Re:You may finally use JSHint for evil by javagram on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @06:56AM (#24059337)
AGPL is widely avoided by corporations precisely because of this problem...

Corporations vastly prefer BSD/MIT style licenses or at most GPLv2.

GPLv3 is avoided, AGPL is avoided even more.

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Re:You may finally use JSHint for evil by gowld on Sunday August 09, 2020 @01:16AM (#24097443)
AGPL is avoided because cloud/server corporations know exactly what it means. It's expressly written to ban their business models.

Likewise for GPLv3 and Tivoized corporations.

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Re:You may finally use JSHint for evil by ricardobeat on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @06:30PM (#24055204)
The license JSHint is moving to is MIT. It is by far the most common license used in OSS libraries and it allows usage or re-licensing in proprietary software.

That is the context from which I'm speaking, where enforcing openness through legal means is not a concern as the license is permissive (I imagine you were thinking of protecting GPL software, which is kind of the opposite situation). There have been zero court cases involving legal dispute over MIT licensed software.

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Re:You may finally use JSHint for evil by geofft on Wednesday August 05, 2020 @02:01AM (#24057698)
Right, the unmodified MIT license is fine. There haven't been any cases precisely because of how unambiguous it is in giving permission.

The question is, how do I know that a contributor to software under the JSLint license (perhaps a corporation that paid an employee to contribute something) won't sue me on the grounds that I'm doing evil with their code?

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Re:You may finally use JSHint for evil by bawolff on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @08:41PM (#24056057)
It is not free software.

To quote https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

"The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose"

Do no evil is maybe tounge in check, but its a real issue when people put things in licenses like "nobody from USA gov is allowed to use"

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Re:You may finally use JSHint for evil by jahewson on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @04:57PM (#24054412)
There’s a couple of other central entities which do actually decide what gets to qualify as a legally binding agreement and the WTFPL likely falls short of pleasing them.
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Re:You may finally use JSHint for evil by sedatk on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @04:51PM (#24054367)
WTFPL isn't ambiguous though.
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Re:You may finally use JSHint for evil by duskwuff on Tuesday August 04, 2020 @05:26PM (#24054669)
Yep. WTFPL, while profane, is unambiguous in its permissivity. It is perhaps ill-advised in its lack of a warranty disclaimer, but that's a problem for the developer, not for the end user.
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