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Software Engineering

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    Re your last paragraph: you cannot patent algorithms in many parts of the world (e.g. Europe), and copyright doesn't protect the algorithm but only the actual code as written, so it only avoid people copy&pasting your code not people actually reimplementing the algorithm with different code. Commented May 24, 2016 at 14:59
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    One famous is Douglas Crockford's JSON license: json.org/license.html "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil". Commented May 24, 2016 at 15:17
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    "Then this algorithm is used to build trucks that drive on their own. Still ethical." - Actually...if the self-driving trucks force human truck drivers out of work and into poverty as a side-effect, there's a case to be made that creating self-driving trucks is not ethical. So yes, it's an incredibly vague standard. Commented May 25, 2016 at 2:44
  • It's frustrating that JSLint is constantly held up as why ethical licenses are bad. It's like if someone wrote a law that said "don't be a criminal" and everyone was like "See, you cant use laws to stop criminal behaviour because you can't define criminal". You can, but only if you try ;-) Counterintuitively though, JSLint actually provides some strong evidence that such a license could work. Even though most people speculated that it was unenforcable, IBM still explicitly sought permission to use the software for evil before using it - the fear of possible enforcement was enough. Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 8:43
  • @ChristopherJ What does your comment have to do with my answer? I didn't mention JSLint at all. Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 17:20