alt Hacker NewsIf you think it's an unacceptable risk to use a tool you can't trust when your own head is on the line, you're right, and you shouldn't use it. You don't have to guarantee anything. You just have to accept punishment.
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Yeah, but that's not a useful thing to do because not everybody thinks about that or considers it a problem. If somebody's careless and contributes copyrighted code, that's a problem for linux too, not only the author.
For comparison, you wouldn't say, "you're free to use a pair of dice to decide what material to build the bridge out of, as long as you take responsibility if it falls down", because then of course somebody would be careless enough to build a bridge that falls down.
Preventing the problem from the beginning is better than ensuring you have somebody to blame for the problem when it happens.
That’s just it though it’s not just your head. The liability could very likely also fall on the Linux foundation.
You can’t say “you can do this thing that we know will cause problems that you have no way to mitigate, but if it does we’re not liable”. The infringement was a foreseeable consequence of the policy.