Do you have a start up? Do you hope that you will some day be able to make an exit with that start up? Are you willing to entertain a buy-out by a larger corporation as a possible exit?

If yes, then as much as you (the hacker/startup founder) might not care or have a second thought about licenses like this, you should keep in mind that your potential purchaser almost definitely will.

Also, just for the record, I'm actually a big fan of Crockford's "Do no evil" license. What bothers me is the number of people who don't pay any more attention to the licenses of the software on which they build entire companies than they do to the EULAs of the software they install. Casually agreeing to a EULA is not the same as disregarding an Open Source license.

I completely agree with you here. People should take care about licenses of the software they use, especially in a commercial setup, for all the reasons you stated.

But, you read the license, you decide if you are going to use it or not. That's it. If you are not sure, just don't use it. Use something else if available. Or build your own.

What I don't understand is the basis on which some people complain about the authors choice of the license, and feel offended by his license choice.

edit: s/started/stated/

Indeed. Regarding the article itself, my view would be that the blame lies squarely at the feet of the Mono team for using Crockford's code, license and all, knowing that their target audience (finicky Linux distros) might later object. But then, properly assigning blame is a talent few, if any, possess.

No, I'm saying that will not solve the perceived problem.

I suggest more information, such as "Be aware that this software is licensed under a custom license. Click here to view the license."

I don't think the author of the article suggests that evil should be allowed, but that it is very hard to define evil, and that this clause makes the license non-free software.

It honestly would not be that difficult to implement something like this. Both the OSI and FSF maintain lists of "approved" licenses along with standard license text. In fact, Pivotal Labs has created a tool along these lines for Ruby: https://github.com/pivotal/LicenseFinder , and the Leiningen project tool from Clojure allows for licenses to be specified in a machine parseable format: https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/blob/master/sample.... .

I agree with you here. But the software is $free, just now for available to everyone, and "non-free" in the FSF definition of "free".