"Phallacious" is hilarious.

Re yr first half, Stallman diplomacy vs Crockford diplomacy, Stallman seriously implies people who disagree with him are evil, while Crockford jokingly states it outright. So serious implicit vs joking explicit. Are they both less than perfect diplomats? Yes. But Crockford annoys me more because I don't use anything Stallman-related anyway, and although Stallman weirds me out, I kind of prefer serious, nuanced disagreement to blanket condemnation and completely unfounded presumptions of moral authority.

I don't know if you've ever been to Silicon Valley, but a guy with a lot of corporate authority, hand-waving away as "evil" any language use which he disagrees with, is a lot more noxious on his home turf in the southern end of northern California than he is as some random thing you read about on the Internet.

I apologize for the structure of that sentence. I'm a bit tired this morning.

Anyway as to this part:

I can’t bring myself to believe that Mr. Crockford was scheming to waylay lawyers and BigCo when he wrote that line. I also doubt he was trying to ignite an anti-evil fire. Most importantly, I even doubt he imagined that there might be some disagreement about what is or isn’t evil.

Not what I'm saying at all. I don't care what he thought or intended, I care what he did.

If there was, what makes you think he would have the right to decide?

I'm not saying he would have the right. I'm saying he has the privilege. That is to say, the language is sufficiently vague that he could sue almost anybody who used his software for almost anything they did with it. Some people believe that any and all forms of business are evil. Crockford could claim to agree, and use that to sue any business. Some people think all homosexuality is evil, all Christianity, all whatever. The term's lack of specificity constitutes a bona fide risk for any business. Crockford could decide freaking cupcakes are evil if he wants to and take that shit to court to shut down some bakery's web site. It's ridiculous.

Making the lawyers dance just because you can is certainly turnabout, and some say turnabout is always fair play, but to me it just seems irresponsible, self-indulgent, and lame.

To use your analogy, Stallman gives away coffee as long as people agree not to resell it. Most people give coffee away for free and all you have to do is agree not to hold them responsible if the coffee makes you sick (MIT license). Crockford sells you coffee on the condition that you not sue him if it makes you sick, but he also reserves the right to sue you if you do literally anything he disagrees with.

In practical terms, "evil" is so vague as to be unenforceable, but if it's in a legal document, then you can take people to court with it. Dragging somebody into court is expensive for them even if you lose and pay their court costs. There's still lost time and extra stress.

I mean follow that analogy through. Can you imagine the heinous pain in the ass if Crockford one day decides Google's/Facebook's/whoever's privacy invasions make it evil and demands they rewrite whatever they have which uses his code? That's like saying "I'll give you coffee for free, but I reserve the right to remove it from your digestive system at any time." Somebody would have to take existing code apart and rewrite it. Pain in the butt for some giant corporation, but imagine how much worse it'd be for some bootstrapped startup.

The use of "evil" in the Yahoo! docs disgusts me, although nowhere near as much as the YUI API does. I realize it was just a joke, but if it's in a legal document then it's legally binding, and in my entirely personal and idiosyncratic opinion, it reeks of Silicon Valley's arrogance and contempt for small businesses and fair business dealings. Yahoo! can afford to throw lawyers at any small business in the world. It's a very, very, VERY abstracted version of the joke where an aristocrat puts a sword to a peasant's neck and laughs about how he could run them through with it at any moment if he felt like it.

Ha ha ha.