It also makes it impossible for Open Source projects to use and depend on. This isn't a companies-vs-people thing; people and projects who care about their users should not go "meh, whatever" about software licensing.

Does Crockford care about Open Source?

People who aren't doing evil can use it. It's not compatible with FOSS. It's a linter, it doesn't require being incorporated into people's projects.

Making it proprietary would be more limiting, making it Free would also be limiting (in a good way imo.) He chose to make it his way.

And many people chose not to use it as a result, despite having no desire to do "evil". People can certainly license software however they like, and other people can complain about that and build replacements, as JSHint did.

> It's a linter, it doesn't require being incorporated into people's projects.

Many things do want to depend on tools that process source code, such as bundlers, IDEs, transpilers, and similar.