The wildest open source licenses

Introduction

Recent weeks have brought many changes to the open source community. To name a few, let’s bring up the Tailwind situation, curl ends its bug bounty program and quite pessimistic attitude of open source maintainers. This mobilized me to dive deep and check how the LLMs have changed the licenses of open source projects. During my research I spotted some outliers in the open source licensing world - funny, interesting, religious, and idealistic ones - which I would like to present to all of you in this blogpost.

JSON

JSON is infamously known in the open source world for its quite specific license - at first sight it looks like a classic MIT license but when we look closely, there’s one line that makes it totally different:

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

Douglas Crockford, the father of the JSON standard, added this moral clause to address the war on terror, probably without the slightest imagination of the consequences.

Around 2009, Google Code (at the time, the biggest open source host service) stopped hosting projects under this modified license, and a year later the Android development team changed the JSON implementation to another with a less restrictive license. Around this time, one of the maintainers of Debian contacted Douglas and suggested removing the line from license. Crockford responded in a straightforward way:

If you cannot tolerate the license, then do not use the software.

Over the years, the author of JSLint and the JSON standard was approached many times by big tech companies, to change the license, make it possible for them to use it. The best-known case is IBM, when the author finally broke and added a short appendix to the license:

I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.

Clearly sarcastic, but legal from IBM’s lawyers’ perspective.

Today, JSON is one of the most frequently used formats in the world. It’s a fundamental piece of standardization supporting the whole known web.

Vim

Vim, one of the most popular text editors among programmers and weirdos, also has some licensing quirks. The software is officially charityware - free and open source, but encourages users to pay donations to a charity that helps children in Uganda. The maintainer of the project - Dutch programmer Bram Moolenaar - was an advocate for charity in Uganda and actively helped people as a volunteer during many of his trips to the Kibaale Community Centre.

Licenses can be more than a dull, soulless and boring piece of text addressed to lawyers. It can be our way to support people, show our morals and encourage others to the cause. Thanks to Bram’s decision, the foundation he supported received a few thousand dollars yearly. He made direct impact, because alongside the primitive text editor he shared what was important to him.

SQLite

This one isn’t technically a license, but something that we would call today a Code of Conduct. It’s based on teachings of the Christian philosopher and ascetic, St. Benedict and these are around *1,500 years old. The authors of the project stated:

The founder of SQLite and all current developers have pledged to follow the spirit of The Rule to the best of their ability. They view The Rule as their promise to all SQLite users of how the developers are expected to behave. This is a one-way promise, or covenant. In other words, the developers are saying: “We will treat you this way regardless of how you treat us.”

Nevertheless, you rarely encounter an open source project with developers who follow rules unprecedented in computer science, like:

• “Do not commit adultery,”
• “Deny oneself in order to follow Christ,”
• “Be not addicted to wine,”
• “Be not a great eater.”

The project has been functioning with these rules since start of this millennium, but somewhere around 2018, the code of conduct caused public outcry on Twitter. The authors decided back then to rename it from code of conduct to code of ethics. I didn’t find any statistics regarding usage (or lack thereof) in the regions where christianity is a less dominant religion.

Some sources mention that declaration of one-way promise was also changed, previously it sounded a bit more restrictive, including the whole community of SQLite:

This rule is strict, and none are able to comply perfectly. Grace is readily granted for minor transgressions.

However, those who wish to participate in the SQLite community, either by commenting on the public mailing lists or by contributing patches or suggestions or in any other way, are expected to conduct themselves in a manner that honors the overarching spirit of the rule, even if they disagree with specific details. Polite and professional discussion is always welcomed, from anyone.

The SQLite project is still maintained by its ascetic developers, and I hope it will be available regardless of the religion of maintainers and users. It’s one of the most popular database engines and started a family of serverless databases, great for use in data analytics, debugging or even testing, as a drop-in replacement for more sophisticated engines (like PostgreSQL). Today, we have some alternatives, such as DuckDB, but generally speaking, I would say it’s one of the most influential projects in databases.

For us developers, let it be a lesson to know well the rules that maintainers of open source projet agreed on, especially when we also want to participate in the development, or even the community.

Summary

This article came from pure curiosity but I would like to outline and demonstrate the possibilities that licenses bring to us. Choosing or writing your own license is way more than a minor step during project initialization. This document serves both as a set of duties and rights. It gives us power to truly affect the world, or just to make some simple statements aligned with our worldview and goals.