[Labs-l] Question: json license not free enough?

Thu May 30 19:39:06 UTC 2013

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 03:16:47PM -0400, Brad Jorsch wrote:
>Anyone attempting to reach out to this particular author should also
>be aware that he has been contacted about this by other free software
>projects before, and has refused to change his license. He prefers
>instead to assert that he is "stopping evildoers" by maintaining this
>license on his software. Although he does brag that he gave IBM
>special permission to use his stuff "for evil".
>
>Video: http://youtu.be/-C-JoyNuQJs?t=39m45s

Indeed. This has been discussed a number of times in many projects. 
Debian has a nice (IMHO) summary of the problem, including links to 
other discussions and clean-room implementations of JSON: 
http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/jsonevil

Cheers,
Faidon