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tdunning / open-json

Open JSON - a truly open source JSON implementation
Apache License 2.0
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org.json code is now Public Domain #17

Open ash211 opened 6 months ago

ash211 commented 6 months ago

Now that Douglas Crockford has relicensed his code to Public Domain -- see https://github.com/stleary/JSON-java/pull/688 -- is there no longer a reason for this repo's existence?

tdunning commented 6 months ago

Good catch.

Unfortunately, public domain is (surprisingly) not a usable license because not all countries have a corresponding legal concept (Japan, for instance).

In any case, this library was intended to facilitate migration away from json.org implementations. The rationale was that Douglas Crockford was not a reliable source and seemed to view licensing as a lark (see the game played with IBM). My view hasn't changed on that topic. This software was intended to give a sufficiently compatible alternative that Apache projects could drop json.org dependencies immediately and then move on to versions with long-term support.

Those projects have, indeed, largely moved on as planned.

So a more cogent argument for this library to be discarded would be that it's moment in history has passed. That is true, but it doesn't mean that this repository should be deleted. At most, it should be marked as deprecated.