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Comment by cycloptic | Hacker News Reader

If you read the fine print there is, quite literally, no obligation at all. From the MIT license:

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
    IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
    FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.

You will find that most other FOSS licenses contain a similar clause.

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That's a legal disclaimer designed to head off a specific commercial legal liability. If you go looking to use law as a foundation for right and wrong, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

What I quoted isn't a law, this is something that authors have to deliberately put in their licenses/contracts for the specific work in question. If you wish to have other obligations with your open source software that you believe are less wrong, it would be wise to get those in writing.

> it would be wise to get those in writing.

I agree with that, projects should clearly state their goals and priorities upfront. But relying on legalese from MIT license is not the solution.

It's not clear what else it is that you'd want. The MIT license seems to get used because it's short and to the point in stating priorities: Here's the software, do what you want with it, but don't take credit and don't come after us if it doesn't work for your use case or if it causes your CPU to explode. If your issue is with the "legalese," it wouldn't be any less meaningful if you stated it differently.

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