I am a cloud application architect with 10 years' experience in software development in several languages, including Perl, Java and C#. I'm an Irishman living in Calgary, Canada. GitHub on @cubikca.
Location
Calgary, Canada
Education
BSc. Computing and Info Systems, Athabasca University
This seems to be a pretty narrow case where one person regretted a decision given information that wasn't available at the time of his decision. I don't know that I would feel bad if I did my due diligence before partnering, and only found out later that our goals were not aligned. I would certainly not do business with them again, but I can't hold myself accountable for knowledge I couldn't have had.
All that said, I don't worry about what people might do with my code. An "as-is" license should pretty much cover my butt for any conceivable use of my code. But I don't write operating systems or security software. I suppose I might feel differently if I did.
One reason I use permissive licenses is because I am lazy. I don't feel the need to restrict people's use of whatever code I may leave publicly accessible, and I don't want to maintain it if I'm done with it. MIT seems to fit that scenario quite nicely. Again, I'd probably feel differently if I'd written something that people were dependant upon and I wanted to maintain some control over the source code.
FOSS is undoubtedly a great ecosystem. I think it's important that people take reasonable risks to keep it alive. If everyone closed up their code, and didn't write anything publicly for fear that someone would misuse it, I think we'd lose a lot of valuable knowledge in the public domain.
This seems to be a pretty narrow case where one person regretted a decision given information that wasn't available at the time of his decision. I don't know that I would feel bad if I did my due diligence before partnering, and only found out later that our goals were not aligned. I would certainly not do business with them again, but I can't hold myself accountable for knowledge I couldn't have had.
All that said, I don't worry about what people might do with my code. An "as-is" license should pretty much cover my butt for any conceivable use of my code. But I don't write operating systems or security software. I suppose I might feel differently if I did.
One reason I use permissive licenses is because I am lazy. I don't feel the need to restrict people's use of whatever code I may leave publicly accessible, and I don't want to maintain it if I'm done with it. MIT seems to fit that scenario quite nicely. Again, I'd probably feel differently if I'd written something that people were dependant upon and I wanted to maintain some control over the source code.
FOSS is undoubtedly a great ecosystem. I think it's important that people take reasonable risks to keep it alive. If everyone closed up their code, and didn't write anything publicly for fear that someone would misuse it, I think we'd lose a lot of valuable knowledge in the public domain.
But the point made is not about "covering one's ass", it's more in the line of "not happy with the usage". Other than that, totally agree.