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nostrademons • today at 5:52 PM • 5 replies • view on HN

Yeesh, they should've learned that you don't try to get cute in a legal document.

I remember asking about the Crockford License's clause "This software should be used for Good, not Evil" in my Noogler training. And then having Chris DiBona need to tell me "for the purposes of this particular license, Google is Evil". Because the problem is that "good" and "evil" could mean anything in a court of law; they are 100% up to the jury to decide. And so any sane firm that wants to limit its risk and stick to predictable areas of law will not use them.

Yes, it's pretty clear to me that ritual seppuku is not meant to be taken literally. Juries are instructed to consider the text of the contract carefully though: do you have confidence that 12 people chosen at random will reach the same interpretation you do?

Replies

shagie • today at 6:21 PM

> Because the problem is that "good" and "evil" could mean anything in a court of law;

https://youtu.be/-C-JoyNuQJs?t=2386

    Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company -- I don't want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their initials -- IBM [laughter] saying that they want to use something I wrote.

    Because I put this on everything I write, now. They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that?

    Of course. So I wrote back -- this happened literally two weeks ago -- "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

    [laughter and applause]

    And the attorney wrote back and said: "Thanks very much, Douglas!"
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jgilias • today at 8:52 PM

An agreement doesn’t stand above the law. I’m pretty sure that clause is void for, basically, being illegal. Not a lawyer though.

brightball • today at 6:02 PM

> do you have confidence that 12 people chosen at random will reach the same interpretation you do?

The first time I sat on a jury, all of my idealism about juries went out the window.

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