[darcs-users] [patch331] Suggest public domain for tests by default.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Eric Kow writes:

 > I'm looking to see if there's an acceptable two-liner ie. that
 > deals with the warranty thing reasonably clearly.

There isn't.  As Larry Rosen explains in his book, the reason for
having several lines of warranty disclaimer is to make it clear that
you've thought about the kinds of problems that could occur, and you
are willing to spend some bytes warning the users that *all* of them
are not your problem.  A two-line license and disclaimer could be
considered evidence of negligence in a certain sense.

If people don't want to deal with the quaint local customs of the
U.S. legal system, I don't care, but I don't think it's a good idea to
put all contributors at risk this way (and good lawyers agree that
there is a risk here).

 > I'm not 100% certain this will defeat the laziness problem, but
 > maybe it will help for darcs hackers who are simply boilerplate
 > averse.  If not, I'll just drop the issue and MIT it shall be.

Well, you'd have to check with a lawyer about this, but you could
probably do something like *add to* (not *replace*) the author's
public domain dedication:

    This file is included as part of the Darcs test distribution,
    which is licensed to you under the following terms:

    <insert MIT wording here>

which should be effective in limiting Darcs authors' liability.