Comment by Beltalowda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Beltalowda | Hacker News Reader

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I think that's not really an issue for the intended use case: "code that is intended for developers to use as reference, teaching samples, examples, or templates that other developers may modify for their own purposes."

Consider some libfoo, and in libfoo you include example.mylang as a "quickstart" for the common use case, and many people use this as a starting point, modifying it a bit to suit their needs but not much. Technically you should attribute this file/function/class too, but in practice no one does, and no one really cares either.

I've had people ask me to put a license on 2-line Stack Overflow licenses (it's already CC-BY, but people still ask for some reason, I guess to comply with company legal dept.)

It's useful for stuff like that: you typically don't really care what someone does with your fairly simple examples/demos/etc. (which may not even meet the threshold of originality to apply for copyright protection) and whether they attribute it.

But isn't a demo or example code exactly the kind of thing one might want to disclaim liability for?

Consider that code without any license at all, or even explicitly public domain. There is no implied liability at all. It carries as much legal risk as leaving a photocopied Anarchist Cookbook in your sock drawer.

If that's really the case, why does pretty much every software license feel the need to include a liability disclaimer? Genuine question, I've often wondered about this.

I suspect it has more power to prevent litigation (and disputes more generally) than to win anything? It’s also entirely possible it’s just [a much less derisive term than “cargo cult” which eludes me at the moment].

Pro forma is probably the term you’re looking for.

Oh wow that is the term I was looking for! Thank you.

Think even more trivial than a demo or an example -- think more along the lines of a "skeleton" project. Something that isn't even a runnable example yet, just the outline of where someone else's code will go.

Whether something like this is even copyrightable is questionable. But releasing it under a license like MIT-0 removes any ambiguity -- whether it's copyrightable or not, the original author is allowing you to use it for anything at all, no strings attached.

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