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License Utopia

writing.kemitchell.com

43 pointsjanvdberg11 comments

Could anyone explain why it's required to do "notice of liability protections"? To me it seems absurd that unless you are getting something directly in return (ie selling it) someone could sue you for just publishing code.

Probably: "We used that code, and it harmed us in some way (e.g. we had to give someone money for something). You wrote that code. It is your fault. You have to pay us that money now."

Surely such a claim would be thrown out in court and then all cases such after would be dismissed with prejudice, meaning the judicial example would already exist.

Ie. you have an old phone that seems to work but choose to just give it away because why not, then someone loses important info when using the phone because it's old you are not liable for loss of that data.

Any intentional backdoors or on purpose data destruction are are not covered by licenses anyways since you are acting in bad faith when doing those.

Here I would say that creating something new is different than selling or giving away something existing that someone else created.

> Surely such a claim would be thrown out in court and then all cases such after would be dismissed with prejudice, meaning the judicial example would already exist.

Afaik not all courts all over the world work that way, besides of course there being hundreds of courts with different rules that all would have to go through that at least once for a creator to be able to rely on that.

Several minutes' searching failed to find a single real-world example of this happening with open source software specifically, and I don't recall hearing about any such case either.

All of the liabilities I found for open source software involved intellectual property cases.

Are you aware of any cases where this has actually happened? Because, if not, it sounds more like the standard boilerplate disclaimer that lawyers tell you to include just in case anyone ever does try such a thing, rather than a protection against a thing that has actually happened.

I am not aware of any examples. I was purely speculating what a company trying to sue someone might "think" (or use as justification).

Because according to the UCC (United States commercial code or something like that) you can't just say "no warranties". You have to explicitly offer the software "as is" and disclaim one/some implicit warranties BY NAME. It should only apply to merchantability, but you throw everything else in there for good measure.

In the EU we have none of those things, and cross-border issues is governed by the UN version of the UCC which is much more lax with regard to warranties.

Since I live in Sweden I could probably just say "Copyright 2019 Bjoli. You can use this code as you please as long as you don't hold me liable for it's use or remove this notice", but IANAL so don't really listen to me.

Edit: but that is of course only if software is a good, which hasn't really been established.

Someone could sue you for publishing code that causes them damage, if they tried to use it in the way it can reasonably be expected to be used.

And this is not such a bad thing to have to deliberately renounce. You can imply the safety of something just by giving it away for free.

If you built a swingset and put it in a park, you imply that it's safe to use. If a child injures themselves because it breaks, you are liable. Better to say "I don't accept any responsibility if this swing injures you", and let people infer how confident they should be in using it. That's fair, because trust is a reasonable thing to have, and if you can't express the confidence in your product that justifies the trust people have in it by default, they should be made aware of that explicitly.

IANAL, but let's say you write a new open source database connection package. It gets used by some company and due to an obscure bug in the code it deletes all the data in a live production cluster and causes downtime, maybe even loses some data.

I can imagine that a litigious company could potentially try to sue you for the damages that the downtime caused.

I am not sure if I am reading it correctly. So Consistent Copyleft would be used to describe AGPL?

I do feel we have way too many OSL, even the permissive ones, MIT, BSD 0,1,2,3. Apache 2.0 and Dozen or other smaller ones. It is just a bag of hurts.

This. We need copyleft API licenses, simply because the primary way of "linking" nowadays is using APIs. Heck yeah.

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