So does that extend to publishing text without software? No one is forced to believe my free phishing message right? Or my free advice about drinking arsenic to cure cancer?
It is a growing trend to annotate the readme of an open source repo with a kind of statement of confidence. "This is code I'm not vouching for but want to share because it may be useful to others" and "this is my open source project that I consider to be production ready and will tie my reputation to" are very different things.
This was very obviously the second, so ethical duties involving lying to people for your own benefit and concepts of due diligence clearly come in to play.
And even if this makes no sense in your ethical system, at least be aware that people think that way and will remember your name in these kinds of circumstances even if they have no legal recourse.
In a worldwide software ecosystem there is no universal standard for ethics or diligence. Unhappiness in human interactions can usually be traced back to a mismatch of expectations. When I use software I expect nothing more than the formal legal agreement explicitly spells out. That way I'm often pleasantly surprised when software does anything useful at all!
For production software I've found it's wise to have a paid vendor to hold accountable (single throat to choke). Paid support is available for most major FOSS packages.
Ok, you convince everyone in the world of that system of ethics and problem solved!
Until then, set expectations explicitly so that people who make different assumptions from you don't get mad at you. It takes 5 minutes to be explicit in your readme.
Somehow everyone else in the world deals with similar issues without the special pleading so common in software. Software isn't that different, despite your wish to be unbound from normal expectations to not cause harm through misleading communication because you are behind a screen.
It is a growing trend to annotate the readme of an open source repo with a kind of statement of confidence. "This is code I'm not vouching for but want to share because it may be useful to others" and "this is my open source project that I consider to be production ready and will tie my reputation to" are very different things.
This was very obviously the second, so ethical duties involving lying to people for your own benefit and concepts of due diligence clearly come in to play.
And even if this makes no sense in your ethical system, at least be aware that people think that way and will remember your name in these kinds of circumstances even if they have no legal recourse.