Yeesh, they should've learned that you don't try to get cute in a legal document.

I remember asking about the Crockford License's clause "This software should be used for Good, not Evil" in my Noogler training. And then having Chris DiBona need to tell me "for the purposes of this particular license, Google is Evil". Because the problem is that "good" and "evil" could mean anything in a court of law; they are 100% up to the jury to decide. And so any sane firm that wants to limit its risk and stick to predictable areas of law will not use them.

Yes, it's pretty clear to me that ritual seppuku is not meant to be taken literally. Juries are instructed to consider the text of the contract carefully though: do you have confidence that 12 people chosen at random will reach the same interpretation you do?

▲ shagie 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Because the problem is that "good" and "evil" could mean anything in a court of law;

https://youtu.be/-C-JoyNuQJs?t=2386

    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 their name, so I'll just say their initials -- IBM [laughter] saying that they want to use something I wrote.

    Because I put this on everything I write, now. They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that?

    Of course. So I wrote back -- this happened literally two weeks ago -- "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

    [laughter and applause]

    And the attorney wrote back and said: "Thanks very much, Douglas!"

	▲	hirako2000 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And the Ethereum foundation could simply argue in court that they obviously encourage any suicidal member of staff to simply quit. They can enforce that all employees adhere to FOSS principles or would be subject to termination. Many for profit companies have the exact opposite policy.

▲ brightball 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> do you have confidence that 12 people chosen at random will reach the same interpretation you do?

The first time I sat on a jury, all of my idealism about juries went out the window.

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BoxOfRain 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To offer a counterpoint, when I did jury service the other jurors were one of the few parts of the justice system I left with more respect for. Everyone took their duty very seriously even those who were self-employed and thus directly losing out as a consequence of the jury system. If it were me in the dock, I would rather face twelve of my countrymen than officialdom alone whose shortcomings were thrown into relief by the conduct of the jury in my view.

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egl2020 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The one jury that I sat on behaved impeccably. YMMV.

	▲	kiddico 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Same. Working together to put a murderer in prison is one of my favorite memories.
	▲	brightball 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The one that I was on did not. Jumped to a lot of conclusions without evidence to support them.
	▲	a4isms 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And someone else's cynicism about juries went out the window. There's no avoiding defenestration.

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abirch 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unpopular opinion but we should all try to get jury duty instead of getting out of jury duty.

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bityard an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I have never been called for jury duty, but I doubt I would ever be chosen to sit on a jury. Despite the intent of the process, the lawyers on both sides are usually looking for jurors who are likely to be swayed by passionate arguments, not ones who will try very hard to make a logical decision based on whatever evidence is presented.

	▲	nostrademons 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I thought the same and even told my boss "Oh, I really doubt I'll get selected", but then not only was I selected out of the first round (despite going through like 80 people in the 120-person jury pool), I ended up as foreman. They're selecting for neutrality. What both lawyers and the judge all want to see is someone who doesn't have an opinion on the case before it begins. That neutrality could be a product of them being easily swayed by arguments, or it could be someone who is coldly logical and makes a decision purely based on the evidence presented. I watched about 65 people get dismissed, and what they all had in common was they were visibly emotional before the trial had even begun. That is what gets you dismissed. Meanwhile, about half the folks in the jury box didn't even realize that the fact that we were still sitting in the jury box meant we would probably be serving on the jury, we were still like "Oh, I'm probably going to get dismissed because I'm X kind of person and the lawyers aren't going to want X kind of person." If you can think of it that dispassionately, you are the type of person the lawyers want.

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BoxOfRain 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Unpopular perhaps, but correct in my opinion. Rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin in terms of civic duty I think, if I was being tried for a serious crime I would much rather my jurors were people interested in seeing justice done according to the evidence than people who wanted it over with as soon as possible justice be damned. I suspect everyone in a country with juries would want that.

For what it's worth, I probably could have wriggled out of jury service on medical grounds but made sure to do the opposite.

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selectodude an hour ago | parent [-]

I agree but after watching voir dire filter out anyone semi-literate on more than one occasion, I don’t think it much matters. The juries are full of morons because that’s what both the prosecution and defense want the juries to be.

	▲	nostrademons 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Be careful confusing "has no opinion" with "moron". The voir dire process tries to select for people who have no opinion: it's specifically designed to filter for neutrality, because if the trial hasn't even begun yet and you have an opinion, that's a problem. There are some people - oftentimes very literate people - that mistake having no opinion for being stupid. It's very far from that. Oftentimes being neutral and keeping your mouth shut is the smartest thing you can do. There's frequently a popular image of someone who is smart as someone who is very quick to form judgments and articulate them with little information; this can be a useful skill in certain situations but is the opposite of what our legal system wants in a juror.
	▲	BoxOfRain 29 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ah I think there might be a trans-Atlantic difference here and we're talking past each-other a little. I'm in the UK where jury selection isn't really a thing, selection is at random off the electoral roll and the filtering is mostly based on who has a good enough excuse to not do it.

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overfeed 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd be fully support this if the jury allowance makes up for 90-100% of lost income (for any jurors that lose income).

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Lerc 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Try going to a PTA meeting.

You will feel like an intellectual titan.

▲ jgilias an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

An agreement doesn’t stand above the law. I’m pretty sure that clause is void for, basically, being illegal. Not a lawyer though.

	▲	nostrademons 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'd suspect that it's void for those reasons too but I'd also guess that any lawyer would say "You shouldn't have to suspect. Only write contracts with terms that have clearly-defined meanings that will be understood by the court and jury the same way you understand them." The point of the legal system is predictability, after all.

▲ 0c3ca83 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> And then having Chris DiBona need to tell me "for the purposes of this particular license, Google is Evil".

Good to see they've successfully expanded the scope since, and lifted the restrictions on the purposes for which they could be considered evil.

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