The JSON License famously includes a provision stating that “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil”.

This article explores why such provisions are not useful or meaningful in the greater software licensing conversation.

“Evil” is largely part of the software licensing conversation today because of a much earlier line drawn in the sand by open source software licensing proponents demanding that compliant licenses permit use for “Evil” (and consequently, placing a hard restriction on the individual freedom to refuse).

There are two points of popular open source mythology this post will share my experience with:

• People won’t use your project if you don’t use an Open Source Initiative-approved license
• People won’t contribute to to your project if you don’t use an Open Source Initiative-approved license

Many people have ideas about how society should be like and what must be done to change institutions and to work for a revolution. But this is not enough. Often these ideas do not conform to reality and if they do conform to reality there is only one way to test them: Try to put them to work and see if they succeed. Testing our ideas in concrete work is the only way we will ever know if they are correct.

A program is educational source (edu source) software if:

• The source code is available to individuals for personal use, modification, learning and reference

komorebi is edu source software, and the Komorebi License is an edu source license.[1]

Any software license which ensures access to source code fulfils the criteria to be considered an edu source license.

[1]: In addition to being an edu source license, the Komorebi License is also a firewall license, which serves to protect an individual’s freedom to refuse by default.

You’re likely here because you’ve discovered that I generally refuse to use open source licenses for my popular software projects, and you want to engage me in a discussion.

Here is a list of things I consider before accepting an invitation from someone to engage in a discussion about why I do not use open source software licenses.

• Skin in the game - if you have not created, released, and maintained publicly developed software with a user base of a non-trivial size (10k+ users), you’re better off discussing software licensing in the abstract with others whose only hands-on experience is discussing software licensing in the abstract
• Acknowledgment of open source licensing’s genocide problem
• Proposals to address open source licensing’s genocide problem - if you do not consider open source licensing’s genocide problem to be a issue, then we don’t have any common ground for discussion