{"id":"JSON","title":"JSON License","reviewed_on":"2026-09-22","reviewer":"Giray Havur","text_source":"https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spdx/license-list-data/main/text/JSON.txt","text_retrieved":true,"verdict":"created","summary":"Models the licence of the reference JSON implementations: the MIT text with one sentence added, \"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil\". The grant and the notice condition are modelled as on MIT. The added sentence is a use restriction that the vocabulary cannot express and that several reviewers treat as making the licence non-free, so it is quoted and recorded as a gap.","findings":[{"rubric":1,"severity":"info","field":"spdx:licenseId","description":"File name, record identifier, SPDX identifier and IRI local name are all JSON.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":2,"severity":"info","field":"odrl:target","description":"One odrl:AssetCollection of dct:type dcmitype:Software, following MIT.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"The grant is the MIT grant: \"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the \"Software\"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so\". The record permits reproduce, distribute, modify, derive, display, present, grantUse, sublicense, commercial use, derivative works, modified works and the distribution fee.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":3,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:permission","description":"dalicc:ChangeLicense is permitted with the dalicc:compliantLicense duty, as on MIT.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":4,"severity":"minor","field":"odrl:prohibition","description":"No prohibitions. The text has no trademark, endorsement or advertising clause, so dalicc:promote is not prohibited. The good-not-evil sentence is a restriction on use and not a bar on using a name, and no vocabulary term carries it; see the rubric 8 finding.","action":"none"},{"rubric":5,"severity":"major","field":"odrl:duty","description":"cc:Attribution and cc:Notice hang off odrl:distribute, odrl:modify and odrl:derive for \"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software\", exactly as on MIT.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":6,"severity":"minor","field":"dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer","description":"The disclaimer paragraph holds the warranty sentence and the liability sentence. They are split into dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer and dalicc:LiabilityLimitation, the split MIT-0 uses. The MIT record keeps both sentences in dalicc:WarrantyDisclaimer, so the two records split the same paragraph differently.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":7,"severity":"info","field":"cc:jurisdiction","description":"The text names no legal system and sets no term, so cc:jurisdiction is dalicc:worldwide and dalicc:validityType is dalicc:perpetual.","action":"applied"},{"rubric":8,"severity":"gap","field":"dalicc:additionalClauses","description":"\"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.\" No term can carry it. It is not dalicc:fieldOfUseRestriction, which names a field of activity, and it is not a prohibition of any act the vocabulary knows. The sentence is quoted in dalicc:additionalClauses and a term such as dalicc:ethicalUseCondition is proposed, with the note that the clause is why the Free Software Foundation and the Debian project treat this licence as non-free.","action":"none"},{"rubric":9,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"The consistency check of app.services.composer against the dependency graph dg_default returned an empty conflict list.","action":"none"},{"rubric":10,"severity":"info","field":"record","description":"Read against licensedata/licenses/MIT.ttl the deontic model is the same. The difference is one literal in dalicc:additionalClauses, and the split of the disclaimer paragraph into two predicates rather than one.","action":"none"}],"family":"Permissive variants","port_of":null,"variant_kind":null,"variant_of":null,"notes":"cc:legalcode points at the publisher's own licence page and dct:source at the SPDX page. dct:publisher says JSON.org, the name the copyright line in the text uses."}