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Comment by cubano | Hacker News Reader

I agree with this so much that I strongly feel that it should actually be an repos option as it clearly lays out the responsibilities of all parties should they choose to use the code.

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It's almost like we should have some sort of text we can all copy paste in our repositories to indicate this sort of thing.

Mine will always contain: THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ...

And then maybe we should add something about that people can actually use it if they want to: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files ...

Should try to start this is an effort for real!

I usually just put some text to the extent of "this code was written by myself for myself and I'm really not looking for pull requests" in the README.

If you get tired of repeating yourself, do what I wrote about in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28663996 and just use the MIT license. It has all of this outlined explicitly already.

I see what you mean, but in my experience most people will at least skim the README while they ignore the license entirely. So, by putting it in a clearly visible position in the README (say just below the repo title) I catch a few extra people and prevent them from sending in issues/PRs in the first place.

It's also not like it's a lot of work, a 30 seconds one-time investment in my time is less time than I spend on most HN comments.

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