I suspect that quite a few people wanted to use it for projects that had a high likelihood of being considered "evil" by some people, so while the licensing restriction is ridiculous, I wonder if it didn't actually serve its intended purpose? (I'm thinking DoD/intel stuff primarily).
It's not just a matter of being ridiculous, it's a matter of being unenforceable and impossible to comply with. If I created an open source project that used a "no evil" library then how am I supposed to restrict the actions of my users? How do we even define "evil" (which has no legal definition)?
That last bit is the tough one. Some people define homosexuality as evil, others define it with things like women going to school. DC obviously isn't that extreme, but he's using a term in a legal setting that can be defined by different people in completely different ways. This makes it so no business can use this code, and even things like open source projects should be extremely weary.
What this essentially did was allow Douglas Crockford to claim that he open sourced his code while actually keeping it closed and forcing people to go through him if they actually wanted to legally use it. While I'm sure plenty of people use it regardless, there's nothing preventing DC from simply stepping in and forcing them to stop. If he had used a real open source license that would be impossible, but as it stands all he has to do is walk over and say "I consider that evil" and you need to rip his library out.
This isn't just hypothetical. I had to remove code from an open source project because of this. It's why I wrote JShrink, as an open source replacement for the JSMin libary. https://github.com/tedivm/JShrink
As Richelieu said "Give me six lines written by the most honourable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him."
I pay US taxes and the US government kills people around the world. They also subsidise farmers which puts others around the world at a disadvantage contributing to poorer economic circumstances for them. The US incarcerates a large number of people. If the project benefited me or anyone else paying US taxes, then hasn't it benefited the US government, and hence evil?
I believe that's quite the point. It makes you actually question whether what you're doing could possibly be construed as evil. Ridiculous, yes, and legally troubling, but thought provoking for sure.
Not really thought provoking at all. Just opens legal issues as anyone can construe anything as evil. It's not like moral relativism is anything special or novel or needed to be brought into a software license.
As others have pointed out, this is just the license on one implementation, not the spec, so it's not really as big a deal.
I don't know how thought provoking it really is. It's so general, and the range of human opinion is so vast, that it could cover almost anything. For some people, typing up this comment on a fairly power-hungry computer, in an area where most of the electricity comes from burning coal, could be considered evil. Sitting here could be evil. Not sitting here could be evil.
We have testimony in this very thread from tedivm who had to rewrite JSMin because of this laugh. That has to have been a multi-thousand-dollar project right there.
Think about the time IBM alone spent on this issue. Developers, managers, lawyers. Five grand? Easily. Maybe more.
Play out this scenario a few hundred times across the globe, and there's your million dollars.
The problem is, when you have a laugh at somebody's expense, it isn't free. It comes at somebody's expense.
And ultimately the laugh wasn't worth a penny, because the license was finally changed to a true open source (public domain) license.
Bullshit. You are not entitled to any particular piece of software, not a single thing is taken from you when you find a software license intolerable. So something isn't licensed how you like... so what? Negotiate new terms, or move on with your life and use something else.
Bitching that something is 'Do no evil' licensed so that you cannot use it is no better than bitching that something is GPLv3'd so you cannot use it, or something is only licensed under proprietary licenses so you cannot use it.
People getting upset over licenses that render software unenjoyable to themselves is the sort of entitled bullshit that makes me want to seek out the most obnoxious license possible. Somebody should make a AGPLv3/Do no Evil hybrid license and write some mildly useful piece of software to use it for, then refuse to duel-license for any earthly fee. That should make some people squirm.
I made a simple economic statement, and I stand by it: The "shall be used for Good, not Evil" episode had a very real cost to it.
People did exactly what you say: negotiated new terms (like IBM) or moved on with their lives and found or wrote something else (like tedivm).
Sure, my million dollar estimate could be way off. But the cost wasn't a small one, and it wasn't just money.
Consider the many developers who saw what looked like an ordinary MIT license and didn't notice the change in the middle or understand the problem with it - maybe thought it was just a cute sentiment. So they made plans and commitments based on being able to use the code. Then their managers made commitments to their bosses and customers. And finally, they all got shot down by Legal and had to scramble to find another solution.
This cost people time and reputation.
GPL and proprietary licenses are different, because they would never be mistaken for the MIT license. A developer could easily find out if they were on the company's approved list or not. And as you know, the GPL itself forbids any changes to its text. So the same problem would be much less likely to happen with those kinds of licenses.