Please change jshint.js license, remove bad or evil

[osallou]

Hi,
could you please modify the jshint.js license to be a real MIT license?

The "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." prevents library to be packaged in Debian and maybe other repo where code should really be free of use (yes, even evil). And honestly, if someone wants to use it for evil... well I don't think he will care about the license :-)

Thanks

Olivier

[manix84]

I don't know is this can ever happen, as the "bad or evil" licence is the original software licence for JSLint.

[hellais]

I also think this should happen as soon as possible as this is a major obstacle to shipping also other pieces of software.

Se as an example this very sad thread on the debian bug reporter: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=673727.

[goatslacker]

This isn't possible without removing all Crockford code from JSHINT. It can definitely happen though.

[valueof]

I need input from someone who understands legal. (I don't)

[dcramer]

I'm pretty sure @goatslacker is correct. You could ask Crockford to change his license :)

[hellais]

@goatslacker where can I find a reference to all the code written by Crockford part of this repository?

[dcramer]

@hellais you can run a diff against the first commit to jshint (which would have been where the fork started), to the current HEAD

[hellais]

Git tells me this:

web/jshint - [master] » git log --author="Douglas Crockford" --oneline --shortstat
40e3f73 It
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
7c327bf Tolerate stupid blockless blocks.
 1 file changed, 21 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)
8d1c4eb clarification
40e3f73 It
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
7c327bf Tolerate stupid blockless blocks.
 1 file changed, 21 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)
8d1c4eb clarification
 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
5675d2c http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/jslint_com/message/1730
 5 files changed, 2752 insertions(+), 2847 deletions(-)
73c2fe3 indent
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
d41c211 http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/jslint_com/
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)
d7896b2 step_in step_out
 1 file changed, 18 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
85c95ac for var
 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
caa8885 use strict
 2 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
1da55dd http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/12/14/strict-mode-is-coming-to-town/
 2 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)
b6d8b25 use strict
 4 files changed, 25 insertions(+), 25 deletions(-)
dc4a013 JSON escape v
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
80a2252 JSON escape single quote
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
bdd3576 k
 4 files changed, 8 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
6735394 Cleanup.
 2 files changed, 159 insertions(+), 167 deletions(-)
00d8d1f option.predef
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
6af839a option.predef
 2 files changed, 91 insertions(+), 66 deletions(-)
c933206 Warn on new Array(NUMBER)
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 17 deletions(-)
f73d206 Add fullinit_ui.js, an ADsafe widget
 3 files changed, 159 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
523956b Removing rhino.js and wsh.js. Other projects are providing better alternatives.
 4 files changed, 4 insertions(+), 67 deletions(-)
d98f753 dangerous comments
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
35ec4a5 groove
 5 files changed, 95 insertions(+), 203 deletions(-)
d4a0702 More css colors
 1 file changed, 99 insertions(+), 64 deletions(-)
eb939e7 Use charAt instead of [] in line 1786.
 2 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
7800939 Add README
 1 file changed, 20 insertions(+)
ca120a7 first commit
 6 files changed, 7011 insertions(+)

Should not be that much...

[valueof]

What @dcramer said. It won't be very useful, though, since I switched from spaces to tabs along the way. So you will need to do something like that:

1. Checkout first JSHint commit. Convert it to tabs.
2. Checkout latest JSHint commit.
3. Diff (1) and (2) using a normal diff tool.

Lexer was rewritten completely, parser was changed substantially and, to be honest, I don't think @douglascrockford is going to sue me if I change the license. But, still, I don't want to be a douchebag. :-)

[hellais]

@antonkovalyov I think a regular diff will not work either because the code structure has drastically changed. I am looking into a possible way of determining which portions of the code are from the original author.

Exploring possibilities such as simian or checkstyle http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/config_duplicates.html.

[hellais]

After extracting all the JS code from this head: 40e3f73 (the last commit by git log --author="Douglas Crockford") and comparing that with all the js under the src/*.js root of the current master.

Running the two through the following similarity analyser:

Similarity Analyser 2.3.34 - http://www.harukizaemon.com/simian
Copyright (c) 2003-2013 Simon Harris.  All rights reserved.
Simian is not free unless used solely for non-commercial or evaluation purposes.

And extracting the lines of code that appear to be present in both 40e3f73 and current master it appears these are the only lines of code left in this repository that were written by Douglas Crockford:

----------------------
                lbp: p,
                value: s
            };
        }
        return x;
    }

    function delim(s) {
        return symbol(s, 0);
    }


----------------------
----------------------
        identifier: true,
        nud: function () {
            var v = this.value,
                s = scope[v],
                f;

            if (typeof s === "function") {

----------------------
----------------------
        member = {};
        membersOnly = null;
        implied = {};
        inblock = false;
        lookahead = [];
        warnings = 0;
        unuseds = [];

----------------------
----------------------
    confirm: false,
    console: false,
    Debug  : false,
    opera  : false,
    prompt : false
};


----------------------
----------------------
        }

        if (!a) {
            a = [line];
            implied[name] = a;
        } else if (a[a.length - 1] !== line) {
            a.push(line);
        }
    }

----------------------
----------------------
                char = this.peek(index);
                if (!isDecimalDigit(char)) {
                    break;
                }
                value += char;
                index += 1;
            }
        }

----------------------
----------------------
    }

    function warningAt(m, l, ch, a, b, c, d) {
        return warning(m, {
            line: l,
            from: ch
        }, a, b, c, d);
    }

    function error(m, t, a, b, c, d) {
        warning(m, t, a, b, c, d);
    }

----------------------
----------------------
        };
        return x;
    }

    function type(s, f) {
        var x = delim(s);
        x.type = s;
        x.nud = f;
        return x;
    }


----------------------
----------------------
                                    case '<':
                                        if (xmode === 'script') {
                                            c = s.charAt(l);
                                            if (c === '!' || c === '/') {
                                                warningAt(
"HTML confusion in regular expression '<{a}'.", line, from + l, c);
                                            }
                                        }

----------------------
----------------------
            Object              : false,
            parseInt            : false,
            parseFloat          : false,
            RangeError          : false,
            ReferenceError      : false,
            RegExp              : false,
            String              : false,
            SyntaxError         : false,

----------------------
----------------------
            Function            : false,
            hasOwnProperty      : false,
            isFinite            : false,
            isNaN               : false,
            JSON                : false,
            Math                : false,
            Number              : false,
            Object              : false,

----------------------
----------------------
    Boolean            : false,
    Date               : false,
    decodeURI          : false,
    decodeURIComponent : false,
    encodeURI          : false,
    encodeURIComponent : false,
    Error              : false,
    "eval"             : false,
    EvalError          : false,

----------------------
----------------------
            onbeforeunload  : true,
            onblur          : true,
            onerror         : true,
            onfocus         : true,
            onload          : true,
            onresize        : true,
            onunload        : true,
            open            : false,
            opener          : false,
            Option          : false,

----------------------
----------------------
        }
    }

    // We need a peek function. If it has an argument, it peeks that much farther
    // ahead. It is used to distinguish
    //     for ( var i in ...
    // from
    //     for ( var i = ...

    function peek(p) {
        var i = p || 0, j = 0, t;

        while (j <= i) {
            t = lookahead[j];
            if (!t) {
                t = lookahead[j] = lex.token();
            }
            j += 1;
        }
        return t;
    }

    // Produce the next token. It looks for programming errors.

    function advance(id, t) {
        switch (state.tokens.curr.id) {
        case "(number)":

----------------------
----------------------
            Option          : false,
            parent          : false,
            print           : false,
            removeEventListener: false,
            resizeBy        : false,
            resizeTo        : false,
            screen          : false,
            scroll          : false,
            scrollBy        : false,
            scrollTo        : false,
            setInterval     : false,
            setTimeout      : false,

----------------------
----------------------
            loadClass   : false,
            print       : false,
            quit        : false,
            readFile    : false,
            readUrl     : false,
            runCommand  : false,
            seal        : false,
            serialize   : false,
            spawn       : false,
            sync        : false,
            toint32     : false,
            version     : false
        },


----------------------
----------------------
                    name: n,
                    line: implied[n]
                });
            }
        }

        if (implieds.length > 0) {
            data.implieds = implieds;
        }

        if (urls.length > 0) {
            data.urls = urls;
        }

        globals = Object.keys(scope);
        if (globals.length > 0) {
            data.globals = globals;
        }

        for (i = 1; i < functions.length; i += 1) {
            f = functions[i];
            fu = {};

            for (j = 0; j < functionicity.length; j += 1) {
                fu[functionicity[j]] = [];
            }


----------------------

This is a quite trivial quantity.

I do not know what is the best way to proceed here. I think it may be the case to ask a professional lawyer for help.

[hellais]

BTW those are 195 lines of code in a project that has over 9000 lines of code.

[dcramer]

I may have no idea what's going on here, but I can't imagine that jshint rewrote 8800 lines of jslint

[hellais]

I re-ran simian with a threshold of 2 (this means blocks of fewer similar lines will also be displayed) and I got 708 duplicate lines.

@dcramer what would you suggest doing regarding refactoring out Crockford's code from jshint or getting the license changed?

[dstufft]

@hellais I'd suggest talking to a lawyer as I think anything else is likely to be pointing a gun squarely at some feet.