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bunderbunder • today at 4:05 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

There's a long literary tradition of representing contracts as a tool of villainy. Signing them is generally treated as a Faustian bargain.

This is a great example of why. Most humans have a sense, deep down, that contracts often exist to bridge the gulf between the ethically defensible and the legally defensible.

It's hard to imagine that any sane person who is just looking to use a popular editor would read some broad limitation of liability language like the above, and interpret it to mean, "By the way, we intend to quietly delete certain files created by a competing fork of this project whenever we find them."

It's true that contracts with liability limitation clauses like this are an absolute necessity in this day and age. But there's also a non-legal principle of mutual respect that is absolutely necessary to a healthy open source community.


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timschmidt • today at 4:11 PM

> It's hard to imagine that any sane person who is just looking to use a popular editor would read some broad limitation of liability language like the above, and interpret it to mean, "By the way, we intend to quietly delete certain files created by a competing fork of this project whenever we find them."

Forks of projects trodding all over each others files is one of the more common problems that has happened, historically. Prior to the major efforts around freedesktop.org around configuration standardization, it was quite common. It'd be one of the first things I looked for when switching to a fork.

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