Why IBM is allowed to be evil
by Volker Weber
Google’s Chris DiBona emailed me this morning to tell me that unless I removed a specific line from the license of my jsmin-php project (a PHP port of Douglas Crockford’s JSMin), Google Code would no longer host the project.
Read all the way to the end.
[Thanks, Stefan]
Comments
The mentioned license is not welcome on OpenNTF.org:
http://www.openntf.org/blogs/openntf.nsf/d6plinks/BELT-98K495
So I for example removed the org.json java classes from http://www.json.org from our projects and replaced them with json-simple:
http://code.google.com/p/json-simple/
which has almost the same syntax, but is licensed under Apache 2.0.
Finding libraries on the web with proper license, so that your own project can be licensed under Apache 2.0, is already a PITA (e.g. LGPL is not compatible AFAIK). His extra sentence in the license does not really make it better ;-).
What does the Google story have to do with IBM?
Stephan: “Read all the way to the end” :-)
Pure gold. Thanks for the laugh.
I've heard Douglas Crockford tell the same story at another talk. Having worked at IBM and dealt with IBM Legal, it sounds entirely plausible.
