> a bit of a disclaimer in the readme should be expected
Every project already has these. They're in the license files.
> This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
This disclaimer is clear, self-explanatory, legally binding and a standard feature of all licenses. So why do people assume they can use random code from random developers they never met without even looking at the source code?
I don't think it's good to rely on the licence to carry this sort of information. Even if I have a library that I intend to maintain as polished and continually updated code, I'm going to have a licence disclaiming a legally-enforcible warranty.
And I might have a library that over the years changes from being shitty to high quality (and back!). I wouldn't want to go changing the licence to follow its lifecycle.
I think it would be valuable to have some widely understood conventions of text you can put in the README to set appropriate expectations.
Counterintuitively, absolute disclaimers of warranty aren't legally binding in many jurisdictions. So don't assume that you are legally absolved of any responsibility just in virtue of having this line in the license.
That us not how open source ever worked. You get high quality open source from established projects and stability from governance. By governance I mean something like apache or eclipse or linux foundation that forces projects to be lead in certain way.
Random code from random people always had varios quality - from great to horrible.
Every project already has these. They're in the license files.
> This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
This disclaimer is clear, self-explanatory, legally binding and a standard feature of all licenses. So why do people assume they can use random code from random developers they never met without even looking at the source code?