No, they did not. JSlint has a license that says “may not be used for evil.” which is ill-defined. What’s evil? Is what you consider evil what I consider evil? So they asked for a well-specified license. In return they were granted a license to use JSlint for evil purposes, which is obviously a good joke at their expense, but combined with the original license encompasses all uses, and, as such, is well-defined.
You said "no they didn't" then described how they did exactly what the parent said, just with a gloss describing why they wanted to be allowed to "use it for evil".
Please no it just means their lawyers aren't morons. What's evil? Are they getting sued for charging interest? Selling products on Sunday? Supporting the sale of secular texts?
Look, I consider Ananas on Pizza evil. Can Pizza Hut not use JSlint on its website now? That would be furthering evil.
On a more serious take: I support causes that a lot of fundamental Christians could consider evil. Equality for queer people, for example. Marriage for all. Am I allowed to use JSlint for a website that supports those goals?
Why do lawyers worry about things like that? Because it’s their job. Unclear definitions worry them, which is good. Ambiguity ends you up in court.
Lawsuits are costly in terms of money and time invested. They’re a drag. Just the threat of suing often is enough. Incentives are not necessarily equal. You might have on one side a startup just trying to get a product out of the door, on the other side a zealot trying to push his agenda. The whole thing could end up sinking the startup. What’s a viable risk/payoff trade off?
Copyrights can be inherited, too. Who knows if the estate doesn’t have a particular view on good and evil and spends the entire inheritance suing small scale developers just to prove a point.
Now, in this case, it’s a fairly obviously benign case, but for good reasons, (corporate) lawyers stick to well-known licenses and risk avoidance.
Strictly speaking, it's neither an Open Source nor Free Software license, because of th usage restriction which is incompatible with both the Open Source Definition and the Free Software Definition.
Which is good. And puts both Open Source and Free Software in a less than wholesome light, ethically.
"We don't care what you do with this as long as you reshare/etc" encourages a misleadingly narrow focus within the bigger picture of corporate and professional ethics.
IMO there's no realistic presumption of unquestioned goodness on the part of GPL. If someone wants to create code with a "No evil" license, they're perfectly entitled to apply one. Everyone else has to live with the consequences, just as they have to live with GPL etc.
Certainly, everyone is entitled to use whatever license terms they wish.
I don’t consider that a solution for the ethics problem, though. What’s good and what’s evil is a very grey area. Ambiguous terms don’t make a good license. Most people consider themselves good. Many Facebook engineers consider themselves good, I’d wager. Does that make Facebook good? Russian intelligence officers probably consider themselves good. Does that make their use of JSlint good? Even Nazis considered themselves good. The entire ideology was centered around that narrative. So how can a license using those terms solve the ethics problem?
Correct. It would still be compatible with many of them, though. There’s no provision forbidding additional restrictions placed on the software in MIT, BSD, APL, MPL for example.
There's two kinds of license compatibility one might care about, relicensing compatibility and license merging compatibility (“can a project using a particular license adopt components with another license with no effect on the restrictions imposed downstream” [a somewhat weaker form of this that is unconcerned with additional notice requirements that have no substantive effect on what downstream users can do is perhaps the more common form] vs. “can a project use upstream component under one license simultaneously with upstream components under another license at all”). JSLint has license merging compatibility with some F/OSS licenses, but not even the weaker form of relicensing compatibility (although permissive license will often have at least the weaker form of relicensing compatibility going to the JSLint license.)
