For years, my clients have asked me what to do about the “Good not Evil” license, which is most famously applied to JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), a widely used format for storing a…
You May Finally Use JSHint for Evil
JSHint is a software tool designed to help developers write JavaScript code. Since its creation in 2011, it has been encumbered by a license which includes the following clause: The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil. That stipulation disqualifies JSHint from the distinction of “free” software and “open source” software. Today, with a release 7 years in the making, we’re removing the clause. Support for Evil is a new feature but not a breaking change, so in keeping with Semantic Versioning, we’ve incremented JSHint’s minor version.
Sorting out the Ethical Licensing Mess
Software developers who give the world, for free, usage rights to the code they write often use open source licenses to make this gift legally explicit. These free usage rights (and then some) are …
Permissive-Washing in the Open AI Supply Chain: A Large-Scale Audit of License Integrity
Permissive licenses like MIT, Apache-2.0, and BSD-3-Clause dominate open-source AI, signaling that artifacts like models, datasets, and code can be freely used, modified, and redistributed. However, these licenses carry mandatory requirements: include the full license text, provide a copyright notice, and preserve upstream attribution, that remain unverified at scale. Failure to meet these conditions can place reuse outside the scope of the license, effectively leaving AI artifacts under default copyright for those uses and exposing downstream users to litigation. We call this phenomenon ``permissive washing'': labeling AI artifacts as free to use, while omitting the legal documentation required to make that label actionable. To assess how widespread permissive washing is in the AI supply chain, we empirically audit 124,278 dataset $\rightarrow$ model $\rightarrow$ application supply chains, spanning 3,338 datasets, 6,664 models, and 28,516 applications across Hugging Face and GitHub. We find that an astonishing 96.5\% of datasets and 95.8\% of models lack the required license text, only 2.3\% of datasets and 3.2\% of models satisfy both license text and copyright requirements, and even when upstream artifacts provide complete licensing evidence, attribution rarely propagates downstream: only 27.59\% of models preserve compliant dataset notices and only 5.75\% of applications preserve compliant model notices (with just 6.38\% preserving any linked upstream notice). Practitioners cannot assume permissive labels confer the rights they claim: license files and notices, not metadata, are the source of legal truth. To support future research, we release our full audit dataset and reproducible pipeline.
Steve Krouse on Twitter / X
*gets up on soap box*With the announcement of this new "code mode" from Anthropic and Cloudflare, I've gotta rant about LLMs, MCP, and tool-calling for a second Let's all remember where this startedLLMs were bad at writing JSONSo OpenAI asked us to write good JSON schemas…— Steve Krouse (@stevekrouse) November 7, 2025
JSON Formatter & Validator
Format and validate JSON data so that it can easily be read by human beings.
Introducing the Permissive License Stack
We believe open-source values are critical to free societies, especially in the digital age. To that end, we’ve created a new approach to licensing invoking the principles of the Default Open Pledge
A New Ethical Open Source License for Machine Learning from ml5.js?
I put things here so they are on the internet
human.json
A lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their website content and vouch for the humanity of others.
Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security
Today we are launching the beta of EmDash, a full-stack serverless JavaScript CMS built on Astro 6.0. It combines the features of a traditional CMS with modern security, running plugins in sandboxed Worker isolates.
Open Responses
This is the standardization effort I've most wanted in the world of LLMs: a vendor-neutral specification for the JSON API that clients can use to talk to hosted LLMs. Open …
RSL: Really Simple Licensing
The open content licensing standard for the AI-first Internet
First Read: The Fair Source License
Text and my first thoughts on a new, non-open source form license
Why I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft