Open-source licenses aren't some kind of restraint that lawyers use to chain down free software. They're the carefully-crafted wings that enable a free-software

Open-source licenses aren't some kind of restraint that lawyers use to chain down free software. They're the carefully-crafted wings that enable a free-software ecosystem to fly at all. Without the licenses free software doesn't get more free. It just dies. Everybody runs away from it. Copyright law is clear: It belongs to the original author, and without a clear transfer of rights, nobody dares to reuse it except in secret. It's technically risky even to read it, lest you establish evidence that will later be used against you in a copyright suit. And it's risky to offer the original author a patch without an explicit disclaimer of warranty - after all, the author owns and controls the code, and the fact that the codebase looked like comedy on Tuesday doesn't mean it won't be part of a nuclear power plant by Friday night. (Of course, when the lawsuit happens you'll probably be able to argue that the use of your patch in a nuclear power plant wasn't authorized. But that argument may have to be made to a jury, by a lawyer that is costing you a lot of money.)