[amelius]

Rust should include in their license: "The Software/Language shall be used for Good, not Evil"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford#%22Good,_not...

[justapassenger]

Who decides what’s good and what’s evil?

Real life isn’t kindergarten, world isn’t black and white. Even for things that most of people can agree are good, you’ll have negative externalities.

[amelius]

It was just a suggestion without the details carved out.

You could make it very explicit: X shall not be used for advertising purposes. In legalese, of course, so a judge knows what is meant.

[justapassenger]

Define advertising purpose. Rust affiliated organizations are advertising (for example conferences are being advertised).

Is only serving ads or also using ads not allowed?

Given that almost every single company in the world is using advertising then it becomes a hobbyist tool.

With serving - how about if I have a page/app that includes ads served by third party (like most of the world does). Does it make it also off limits?

Statements like that sound pretty cool, but ignore real world complexity.

[amelius]

This is why you ask a lawyer to write your license.

[justapassenger]

Lawyer won't be able to make those basic decisions for you. They'll be able to help write it in a way that has chance of being enforceable, but if you don't know where you want to draw the line, they also won't

[adwn]

Why? What effect would this have, in your opinion?

Also, who decides what is "good", and what is "evil"? For proper licensing terms, a judge can decide whether those terms have been violated within a given jurisdiction. Would you have philosophers take their place? What a bunch of nonsense.

[geodel]

> Also, who decides what is "good", and what is "evil"?

Huh, Rust developers have plenty of opinions about "good" and "evil" on everything under sun. They peddle it non-stop on social media. So they seem perfectly capable to decide on that.

[adwn]

The Rust developers don't have the power to enforce a license – that's up to courts.

[geodel]

They have power to create license. How about doing that much.

[steveklabnik]

Core team member here. There's no desire to change the license.

Also, practically, we do not have a CLA, and have had just under six thousand distinct contributors. We cannot unilaterally change the license. This is a feature, not a bug.

[adambatkin]

That would make Rust no longer Open Source according to the OSI definition, and incompatible with most other OSS.

[capableweb]

Since that line could be interpreted as just "The Software/Language shall be used for Good", any software that is not explicitly "Good" would be forbidden to use Rust, effectively making Rust useless in 90% of companies.