There's a long literary tradition of representing contracts as a tool of villainy. Signing them is generally treated as a Faustian bargain.

This is a great example of why. Most humans have a sense, deep down, that contracts often exist to bridge the gulf between the ethically defensible and the legally defensible.

It's hard to imagine that any sane person who is just looking to use a popular editor would read some broad limitation of liability language like the above, and interpret it to mean, "By the way, we intend to quietly delete certain files created by a competing fork of this project whenever we find them."

It's true that contracts with liability limitation clauses like this are an absolute necessity in this day and age. But there's also a non-legal principle of mutual respect that is absolutely necessary to a healthy open source community.

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timschmidt an hour ago | parent [-]

> It's hard to imagine that any sane person who is just looking to use a popular editor would read some broad limitation of liability language like the above, and interpret it to mean, "By the way, we intend to quietly delete certain files created by a competing fork of this project whenever we find them."

Forks of projects trodding all over each others files is one of the more common problems that has happened, historically. Prior to the major efforts around freedesktop.org around configuration standardization, it was quite common. It'd be one of the first things I looked for when switching to a fork.

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bunderbunder an hour ago | parent [-]

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m saying it shouldn’t be defended as good. It’s a defect. And in this particular incarnation it’s a defect that directly clashes with fundamental Free Software principles such as personal digital sovereignty.

I also suspect that few people actually believe it’s ok and these legalistic defenses are more about circling the wagons. How many people would defend Microsoft if a new Office version automatically and quietly stripped edit history from documents that were originally created by other versions? Would we be hunting for limited liability clauses in their EULA to defend the design decision?

	▲	timschmidt 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> I’m saying it shouldn’t be defended as good. Thankfully, that's not a thing I ever did. > I also suspect that few people actually believe it’s ok and these legalistic defenses are more about circling the wagons. For me it's more about healthy boundaries and expectations. If I'm somehow paying for a project's development, I have higher expectations. If I'm not, I understand that I've chosen the dev/test track and there will be bugs and issues. The developer may choose to run off in an odd direction coughGnome3cough and my only recourse is to fork or hope someone else does. Disagreements as to how things should work happen pretty often. I'm not defending anything or anyone. Just describing the system as it exists.