Beware of Beerware?

[Rahul Sundaram]

Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-08-11 at 15:54 +0200, Simon Wesp wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I want to start a review request and the application i packed is published under Beerware [1] which is not listed in Licensing [2]. 
>> I'm not sure, if i can do this, because there is no no-warrenty clausel in it.
>> Would you say Beerware is a good license, or not?
> 
> Effectively, this is Copyright only. These sorts of "joke licenses"
> probably won't hold up in court, but we probably don't inherit any
> serious legal risk from them.

Upstream should be advised to move to some standard permissive license 
like the MIT or revised 2-clause BSD license. Without a disclaimer, 
there is some legal risk for the developers especially in U.S.

Rahul