YUI Library
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2012–2025
49:26 · 81K views · Aug 28, 2011
Douglas Crockford tells how JSON was discovered rather than invented, and how its simplicity made it a dominant data interchange format. He also covers surrounding history such as earlier Netscape usage and the 'Good, not Evil' license story.
HN commenters cite it as Crockford's first-hand account of JSON's origins and of the no-evil license anecdote.
14 comments from Hacker News
Because using certain keys could break your JavaScript (and JSON was designed to be a subset), like { delete: "me" } If you don't want to keep a list of known keywords around, just insisting on quotes is the easier way. [EDIT: See also this YouTube video, where Douglas Crockford explains it himself: this video ]
You may also get a chuckle out of an anecdote about the license that Douglas Crockford gave during one of this talks: this video
> Personally I don’t like the idea of releasing content with a “use it if I like you “ clause. He’s free to keep it for his own personal use. And he's free to release it under whatever license he wants also. I don't like it as much as a free license either, but it's not my music, and IMO it's better than not granting use; there are of course many cases where people will feel comfortable using it (and in fact it has been used by many people already who have applied common sense to their usage of his work, and I don't believe he has sued anyone or revoked the license in the 18 years he's made it available under similar terms). I also release my code MIT or GPL even though I find it tempting to use less permissive licenses like the "Don't be evil" license of JSON[1] or JSLint[2] I would feel comfortable using Moby's music for lots of purposes personally. I feel like you are overthinking this, I don't think it's about what you believe in, it's about what you think Moby would approve of. If you wanted to release a video promoting veganism, you could obviously use his music (even if you're a democrat). If you wanted to release a video promoting the Democratic party, there's some chance he'd revoke the license (but almost no chance he could successfully sue you). Even if you were a far-right activist using his music for a video supporting an abortion ban, he wouldn't be able to sue you (because banning abortion isn't exclusively a right-wing position), but I expect he would revoke y
Also, there's an ongoing development effort on "Red" programming language [1a][1b][1c], originally attempted as a +/- open-source clone of REBOL (given that original REBOL had a proprietary license, and after version 2 was stuck in development hell for many years). Since then, REBOL in a kinda "pre-3" version was (after long nagging by the community, and arguably to everybody's surprise), released under Apache license circa 2012 [2]; though IIUC, in a kinda "unfinished" state, although I'm not really sure to what extent. Still, the Red language development goes on, I believe in part because of somewhat different philosophies and goals. Back to the language(s) themselves, the REBOL & Red family is very interesting and I think perspective-widening -- which also means it requires some effort to understand well, it's not your typical "Algol in new clothes". What sounds most interesting to me is that it seems to be kinda "dialect-oriented" -- meaning that to use it idiomatically, you should get used to writing tiny parsers (with provided toolbox) for small ad-hoc DSLs. That sounds very nice and interesting, but I unfortunately have one issue with learning that -- that I can't really find good learning resources for that (neither for REBOL nor for Red). Even the official REBOL docs/"manual" seem to be too much "example-oriented" for me; I heavily miss some good "specification"/exhaustive manual, which would show me what are the limits, how does the full BNF look like, etc. In other
Here is the quote the post refers to from "The JSON Saga": When I put the reference implementation onto the website, I needed to put a software license on it. I looked up all the licenses that are available, and there were a lot of them. I decided the one I liked the best was the MIT license, which was a notice that you would put on your source, and it would say: "you're allowed to use this for any purpose you want, just leave the notice in the source, and don't sue me." I love that license, it's really good. But this was late in 2002, we'd just started the War On Terror, and we were going after the evil-doers with the President, and the Vice-President, and I felt like I need to do my part. [laughter] So I added one more line to my license, which was: "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." I thought I'd done my job. About once a year I'll get a letter from a crank who says: "I should have a right to use it for evil!" [laughter] "I'm not going to use it until you change your license!" Or they'll write to me and say: "How do I know if it's evil or not? I don't think it's evil, but someone else might think it's evil, so I'm not going to use it." Great, it's working. My license works, I'm stopping the evil doers! Audience member: If you ask for a separate license, can you use it for evil? Douglas: That's an interesting point. Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company--I don't want to embarrass the company by saying