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Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

Having a license like this could make your software unusable for companies who need to get their licenses vetted by lawyers because they (and their customers) are afraid of being sued for copyright infringement. Do your users a favor by using one of the standard licenses (like the MIT License) that have better-crafted legal language.

As far as I remember, all of the major free software licenses disclaim any obligation to maintain the software, disclaim that the software is fit for any specific task and state that the user uses it at their own risk.

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It's pretty much an "I abandoned this software" licence, so anyone who actually uses it probably doesn't care if potential users can't use it.

If the author doesn't care whether people can use his software, he may be hurting his reputation and credibility by keeping the software publicly available. Potential users who see other software written by him could remember what his attitude toward his previous software was and avoid anything he's associated with in the future. And potential employers who find this code on the web might also be unimpressed with it.

I'm guessing he doesn't care.

Scaring away those companies might be a plus, especially in this case.

It's not that simple unfortunately. Here's an example of what could happen: A is under the shit licence, B depends on A, lots of people use B. Among those people is a big corporation, which needs their licences verified and they decide the shit licence is not acceptable. They'll talk to B about making A optional, replacing it, of will create an internal fork of it. If there's a business case for it, it will happen. And no one else gains anything from those solutions.

If you use a known licence at least there's a chance that those companies will at some point contribute back instead of sitting on their internal patches.

I'm in that situation now with a couple of projects, but I have to patch them locally only. I will not spend days with legal to approve a licence, sign a contributor agreement, or some other form of ownership transfer. Both the project and its users lose that way.

Lawyers contacting you to ask if you're willing to relicense would be an amusing way for it to backfire, though.

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