> If you throw your “little garden path” program up on GitHub and somebody decides to use it to build their “highway,” it really ought to be on them, not you.

> If you throw your “little garden path” program up on GitHub and somebody decides to use it to build their “highway,” it really ought to be on them, not you. It used to be this way (at least in the companies I was involved in back then). In the 90s there was plenty of open source but it was generally a huge no-no to use it in commercial software (even when the license was permissible). Incorporating an open source library (just one!) to our product in the 90s meant months and months of meeting with company lawyers to get that approved. And it meant we (the team developing the product) were 100% on the hook for all fixes. While I'll admit it was a pain, in hindsight there was a lot of benefit from that approach. It discouraged importing random libraries unless there was a lot of value in them, so we had to be selective. It made it crystal clear that open source is not free, there's a lot of cost and liability. While it's convenient today to import a library that brings in 700 other libraries, none of them vetted, any one of which might be full of malware, maybe that's actually not so smart. I increasingly feel we need to go back to explicitly admitting that we (the company) are 100% responsible and liable for the code we ship. If we import it from open source, no matter, we're still on the hook.