Ask HN: If you open source some code, are you responsible for maintaining it?

Re:Ask HN: If you open source some code, are you responsible... by kazinator on Saturday December 06, 2014 @08:27PM (#8710893)

You don't have responsibility to maintain, but the copyright holders of the code are potentially open to liability.

When you open source something, you have to make sure it has a clear license which includes legal disclaimers of warranty and liability. For instance take a look at the disclaimers in the GPL and BSD licenses.

As far as maintenance goes, you have no contractual obligation to anyone to fix anything for them, if you aren't being paid.

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Re:Ask HN: If you open source some code, are you responsible... by nesu on Saturday December 06, 2014 @10:56PM (#8711185)

http://choosealicense.com/licenses/

All open source licenses are not liable for damages arising from the use of open source code

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Re:Ask HN: If you open source some code, are you responsible... by _puk on Saturday December 06, 2014 @11:34PM (#8711254)

Interestingly that page doesn't include the WTFPL [0]

As that licence doesn't include a "no-warranty" statement, and copyright is automatic in most countries (from your link), there must be a fair few open source repos on Github etc that could be liable for damages arising from the use of open source code (or at least fall into a nice grey area I'd personally rather avoid).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

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Re:Ask HN: If you open source some code, are you responsible... by kazinator on Sunday December 07, 2014 @02:10AM (#8711541)

That is simply not the case; only perhaps the ones listed on that page. People sometimes release code without properly licensing it. For instance I have seen code accompanied by a statement like "this code is in the public domain; anyone can do anything they wish" (without any disclaimers of liability).

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