fun fact: IBM asked for, and got, an exception from that clause.
This gave me a brilliant idea:
- Everyone adds a clause to whatever license they use stating “any part of this software may not be used for war purposes of any kind”
- We wait until software with these licences is spread across the supply chain of everything on Earth
- …
- World peace, as no country would be legally allowed to wage war
“Vladimir Putin, you are under arrest for war crimes.”
“It was a special military operation! It was all the fault of the Nazis!”
“No, not for all that. You’re under arrest for violating the GNU GPL! Prepare to meet your source, licencef*****!!!”
*blam* *blam* *blam*
This is peak licensing
Everybody gangsta with the “don’t be evil” clause until the authors turn out to be a nutjob who thinks trans people are blights against God and must be exterminated.
I doubt (or at least hope) that that’s not what they think, but hopefully that illustrates why the clause is dumb.
The FSF also lists any software as non-free which uses the beer license (use the software in any way you want, and should you ever meet the author, pay them a beer).
I thought it was free as in speech not free as in beer? So if it costs a beer then isn’t it still free (as in speech)? Or is this a OSI vs FSF difference?
How does one address the paradox that, as JSON itself is evil, one cannot use it for evil?
(opinions may vary on the above; but it’s mine, so nyah nyah.)
It’s less evil than XML or YAML
XML is ok for complex docs where you have a detailed structure and relationships. JSON is good for simple objects. YAML is good for being something to switch to for the illusion of progress.
Meh. I just wish XML was easier to parse. I have to shuttle a lot of XML data back and forth. As far as I can tell, the only way to query the data is to download a whole engine to run a special query language, and that doesn’t really integrate into any of my workflows. JSON retains the hierarchy and is trivially parsed in almost any programming language. I bet a JSON file containing the exact same data would be much smaller also, since you don’t list each tag twice.
YAML is (mostly) a superset of JSON. Is the face hugger any less evil than the alien bursting out of your chest?
It’s got enough serious flaws and quirks that I can feel smug hating on it. JSON is far from perfect, but overall it’s the least worst of human-readable formats.
Only Python manages to get away with syntactical indentation.
The complaints about yaml’s quirks (
noevaluating tofalse, implicit strings, weird number formats, etc.) are valid in theory but I’ve never encountered them causing any real-life issues.
It’s still using the lesser of 3 evils, we need a fourth human readable data interchange format.
"Problem: There are
34 standardsObligatory xkcd
