JSON is a lightweight data interchange format used for exchanging data across various platforms, first specified by Douglas Crockford in 2002. It's an object-oriented format that represents data as elements or numbers, making it easy to read and write. JSON's simplicity and performance have made it popular over XML, with its compact structure allowing for fast rendering, parsing, and processing. As a free library tool, JSON is open-source, allowing developers to use it with various programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, and many others. Its benefits include speed, scalability, serialization, readability, and ease of use, making it suitable for sharing data across web applications and servers, as well as integrating with modern programming languages and web services. With the availability of JSON tools like editors, converters, validators, minifiers, and formatters, developers can work efficiently with JSON, and its simplicity makes it a robust system that will benefit the technology world.