[pessimizer]

Does Crockford care about Open Source?

People who aren't doing evil can use it. It's not compatible with FOSS. It's a linter, it doesn't require being incorporated into people's projects.

Making it proprietary would be more limiting, making it Free would also be limiting (in a good way imo.) He chose to make it his way.

[JoshTriplett]

And many people chose not to use it as a result, despite having no desire to do "evil". People can certainly license software however they like, and other people can complain about that and build replacements, as JSHint did.

> It's a linter, it doesn't require being incorporated into people's projects.

Many things do want to depend on tools that process source code, such as bundlers, IDEs, transpilers, and similar.