[nl]

> Selling a toaster has an implicit warranty of merchantability. Society expects that if you sell me something, it should have certain promises. Yes, there’s no monetary exchange here, the work is given gratis, but there’s still a relationship and an interaction here and I think it is clear some people, like myself, believe that there are implied expectations.

No there isn't.

Pay money and there's a contract.

Anything else is in your head.

[wang_li]

If you induce someone to expend resources you can have liability even if those resources are not a payment to you. You can’t license your way out liability if you advertised, formally or informally, certain features and functionality that cause people to act on that advertisement. It’s called reliance interest. It’s an actual legal principle with case law supporting it.

[0123456789ABCDE]

full-disclosure: i skimmed the wiki on reliance damages, and concluded you're wrong. it goes something like this: reliance damages require you produce a contract, or some other evidence, that demonstrates you were promised some thing you did not receive, or some outcome you didn't experience. essentially, your claim is: a README file has more standing, in a court of law, than the LICENSE file sitting next to it at the root. cute, but preposterous.

anyway, to the gist of this reply: you disagree with the license conditions. an important, but rather obvious, observation to be had is that, the rights the LICENSE offers, are contingent on your acceptance of the LICENSE conditions. one cannot be had without the other.

the LICENSE is real, it's a contract, and is in effect the moment you obtain a copy.

> You can’t [un-]license your way out [of the] liability if you [copied], formally or informally, [wares] that [you have no rights to, because you disagreed with its license conditions].

[wang_li]

A license is not a contract. It's a grant of permissions from an owner to a recipient that details what they can and cannot do. A license can be part of a transaction, but it does not constitute a contract. Especially in the case of free software where there is no exchange of considerations.

Regardless, contracts are not required for reliance interest to apply.

[0123456789ABCDE]

> A license is not a contract.

you're right, in case law exchange of considerations matters, and licenses are treated as rights grants. however, civil law does not care about considerations, and use of the object implies consent.

but that is irrelevant to our thread, because whether you breach the terms of the contract, or violate the terms of the rights grant, the different legal systems seem to have arrived at the same conclusion: it is copyright infringement

> Regardless, contracts are not required for reliance interest to apply.

was hoping that including "some other evidence" would be enough to avoid that comment

[nl]

This just isn't true.

Reliance requires an exchange of value. If you get something for zero value without a contract it's a gift under US commercial law.

You need to provide citations if you keep insisting otherwise because every open source licence relies on this

[akerl_]

Can you cite the case law about an open source project having a reliance interest?

[nl]

Fortunately this is completely wrong.