[click170]

There's just no sense in telling a hobbyist what to do with his personal time. That means its no longer a hobby, it's a charity exercise.

I think the problem is EULAs. Foss Eula's are pretty straight forward - no warranty: use at your own risk. Corporate software takes the same approach, and I think that's cowardly and underhanded because they are a profit driven entity which, if not incentivized properly, would literally rob you blind.

Corporations are profit driven. No profit, no corporation.

If your going to profit off of selling me something which then burns my house down because it was cheaper for the vendor to not build to standards (best practices), shouldn't they be held liable?

If someone made a lamp for themselves that wasn't up to standard, and then left it out on the curb for garbage pickup when you came along and took it home, plugged it in, and burned down your house, who's fault is that? They didn't sell it to you. There was no purchase.

[stonogo]

Your analogy is flawed. What is happening instead is someone is making a lamp, and then putting a sign on it says "LAMP is a lamp that lights your home! It's compatible with electricity and is under no warranty, express or implied!" and offering to let you take it home.

And you seem to have missed the part where I explicitly said that both commercial and noncommercial software should be exposed to liability lawsuits. EULAs are a waste of everyone's time: anything distributed in an executable format should expose the distributor to liability suits for damages.

[chronid]

No, what is happening is someone making the instructions on how creating a lamp public and saying "I use this lamp in a controlled environment where using it cannot hurt anyone. If you try to use it outside of a similar controlled environment it may explode in your face, create a black hole and/or anhilate the universe. I don't really know, since I did not test it in that environment. Use it at your own risk." Then people go and use it outside that controlled environment, maybe making other people pay for using the lamp created following the instructions.

And now the creator of the instructions is liable for damages? Wait, what?

[stonogo]

There is a real an unavoidable distinction between throwing stuff up on github and distributing software packaged for easy insertion into your operating system. If it's so incredibly difficult to test, why provide binaries?

[click170]

Hm, that's fair.

For what it's worth, I didn't miss that part, I just disagree with it.

But let's explore the idea that anything distributed in an executable format should expose the distributor to liability.

How do you define executable? I mean, what about languages which are optionally compiled, or python or ruby packages for example? And when you say distributor, do you mean distributor or do you mean author? Eg, is Github responsible because they hosted/distributed my code?