Douglas Crockford

Education

Crockford earned a degree in Radio and Television from San Francisco State University in 1975. He took classes in FORTRAN and worked with a university lab's computer.

Career

Crockford purchased an Atari 8-bit computer in 1980 and wrote the game Galahad and the Holy Grail for the Atari Program Exchange (APX), which resulted in Chris Crawford hiring him at Atari, Inc. While at Atari, Crockford wrote another game, Burgers!, for APX and a number of experimental audio/visual demos that were freely distributed.

After Warner Communications sold the company, he joined National Semiconductor. In 1984 Crockford joined Lucasfilm, and later Paramount Pictures. He became known on video game oriented listservs in the early 1990s after he posted his memoir "The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion" to a video gaming bulletin board. The memoir documented his efforts to censor the computer game Maniac Mansion to Nintendo's satisfaction so that they could release it as a cartridge, and Crockford's mounting frustrations as Nintendo's demands became more obscure and confusing.

Together with Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar, Crockford founded Electric Communities and was its CEO from 1994 to 1995. He was involved in the development of the programming language E. Crockford was the founder of State Software (also known as Veil Networks) and its CTO from 2001 to 2002. During his time at State Software, Crockford popularized the JSON data format, based upon existing JavaScript language constructs, as a lightweight alternative to XML. He obtained the domain name json.org in 2002, and put up his description of the format there. In July 2006, he specified the format officially, as RFC 4627.

In 2008 Crockford published a book announcing his discovery that JavaScript, contrary to prevailing opinion, has good parts. He describes this as "heresy", and as "maybe the first important discovery of the 21st century", noting that it came as a "big surprise to the JavaScript community, and the world at large." He attributes the discovery to his having read the ECMAScript Standard, which he says "literally changed my life." He also notes that the specification document is of "extremely poor quality", "hard to read", "hard to understand", and says that the ECMA and the TC39 committee "should be deeply embarrassed".

Software license for "Good, not Evil"

In 2002, in reference to President George Bush's war on "evildoers", Crockford started releasing his JSMin software under a customized open source MIT License, with the added requirement that "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil". This clause was carried over to JSMin-PHP, a variation of JSMin by Ryan Grove. This software was hosted on Google Code until December 2009 when, due to the additional clause, Google determined that the license was not compliant with the definition of free and open source software, which does not permit any restriction on how software may be used. JSMin-PHP was forced to migrate to a new hosting provider. According to the GNU project, the licence conflicts with Freedom 0 of the Free Software definition, and although "it may be unenforceable, we cannot presume that", therefore non-free.

Crockford's license has caused problems for some open source projects who mistook the license for an open source variant of the MIT license. Affected open source developers have asked Crockford to change the license, but he has continued to use it. In 2022, Crockford changed the license in the JSON Java implementation to Public Domain.

Bibliography

References

References

1. (December 4, 2003). "JSMIN, The JavaScript Minifier". Crockford.com.
2. [http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/new_paradigms/crockfor.html Douglas Crockford speaker biography] {{webarchive. link. (February 6, 2007 , New Paradigms for Using Computers conference, IBM Almaden Research Center, August 22, 1996)
3. Boosman, Frank. (March 1987). "Designer Profile: Doug Crockford".
4. "Atari Program Exchange: Burgers!". atariarchives.org.
5. (November 26, 2012). "Hollywood Medieval demo for Atari 8-bit".
6. (February 21, 2012). "Ballsong Nr 1 demo for Atari 8-bit".
7. [http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion: A Memoir by Douglas Crockford]
8. Seibel, Peter. (21 December 2009). "Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming". Apress.
9. (2015-02-15). "Douglas Crockford".
10. [http://www.json.org/fatfree.html JSON: The Fat-Free Alternative to XML], Douglas Crockford, December 6, 2006
11. [http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4627 RFC 4627: The application/json Media Type for JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)]
12. Crockford, Douglas. (11 March 2011). "Heresy & Heretical Open Source: A Heretic's Perspective".
13. "How JavaScript Works: Sample Chapter".
14. "JavaScript: The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language".
15. (February 22, 1999). "The Open Source Definition | Open Source Initiative". Opensource.org.
16. (October 21, 2007). "OSI FAQ entry on 'evil'". Opensource.org.
17. Shankland, Stephen. (December 28, 2009). "'Don't-be-evil' Google spurns no-evil software | Deep Tech - CNET News". News.cnet.com.
18. wonko.com. (December 8, 2009). "JSMin isn't welcome on Google Code". wonko.com.
19. Stallman, Richard. "Licence List".
20. directhex. (November 9, 2012). "Archive » Evil, or why Douglas Crockford is harmful to Free Software". Apebox.Org.
21. (January 30, 2012). "JSON.org License Literally Says it "shall be used for Good, not Evil" | Hacker News". News.ycombinator.com.
22. (January 30, 2014). "Bug #63520 JSON extension includes a problematic license statement". bugs.php.net.
23. (August 23, 2022). "Public Domain".