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

[Brad Jorsch]

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 3:01 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 11:56 AM, Luis Villa <lvilla at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> That would definitely be best, both for our community and the broader open
>> source community.
>
> If anyone reaches out to the author, my recommendation would be to
> attempt to persuade them to use a clause such as "For legal purposes,
> the source code is in the public domain" or some other such caveat.
> The author likely is no fan of traditional open source licenses, but
> in my experience, people like that respond well to pragmatic
> approaches.

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


-- 
Brad Jorsch
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation