In this case the point of the licence is that the original author knows they have done something terrible and/or inadvisable (probably out of desperation), but still... The code worked once and it might be useful to someone else in a bind, but the author absolutely does not want anything to do with whatever new problem it was leveraged against, or the fallout if this time it doesn't work.

A licence is not provided with free software in order to convince you that you should use that person's code. It's provided because some people are just shirty enough to steal other people's work, claim it for themselves, and then eventually sue the original author for copyright infringement.