The "unless required by law (...)" part is the problem.
Compare it to ISC's disclaimer:
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
The intent is that I provide code and I'm not held liable if you use it irresponsibly or recklessly. Whatever current laws are, licenses can be tested in some local court and found invalid, but laws change and not all courts rule the same on a Tuesday. Therefore a license should state intent and not encode a certain market's laws from a certain year.
Patents are a special case because of the racketeering going on. Like copyright, the patent system was meant to foster more published work and not as a money making and extortion mechanism. There's a reason why places without concern for copyright or patents are more innovative. In that sense the liberal licenses encourage use in all situations by anybody because they want it to be used rather than restrict who's allowed to use it in what way.
The real problem is that there is no software safety or quality standard which can be measured and tested like for everyday items such as knives or power tools and won't exist for the immediate future. But that doesn't mean we should include disclaimers that hold you liable if somebody deletes their backups with your implementation of /bin/rm.
The interesting question then is if you need and want GPLv2 and Apache License 2.0 because they explicitly claim liability, does that mean you cannot use OpenSSH, OpenSSL or FreeBSD? Wouldn't you in that case be using an "illegal" tool like medicine from another continent?
You are not a legislator, your contract/license can not nullify acts of the legislative branch. If something is required by law it is in there, you don't get a say about it until next election day. I would be very interested to know why you think the ISC license is above the law, do you have any references that say software licenses can nullify legislative acts?
An open source software license is the wrong place to include what's current law in one or more jurisdictions. As I said, it's the job of a particular court to decide if a license is valid in some specific place. An open source software license is meant for the whole world and therefore should only include the intentions of the author without an encoding of current laws. The software is likely to exist longer than some law that was encoded into a license text. I'm sorry you took my text to mean I'm suggesting a license can void laws. On the contrary I was suggesting it cannot, but English isn't my first language, and I may have failed to be clear.
Again, what about the illegality of using a BSD/MIT licensed piece of software if you require GPL/Apache style liability?
Compare it to ISC's disclaimer:
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.
The intent is that I provide code and I'm not held liable if you use it irresponsibly or recklessly. Whatever current laws are, licenses can be tested in some local court and found invalid, but laws change and not all courts rule the same on a Tuesday. Therefore a license should state intent and not encode a certain market's laws from a certain year.
Patents are a special case because of the racketeering going on. Like copyright, the patent system was meant to foster more published work and not as a money making and extortion mechanism. There's a reason why places without concern for copyright or patents are more innovative. In that sense the liberal licenses encourage use in all situations by anybody because they want it to be used rather than restrict who's allowed to use it in what way.
The real problem is that there is no software safety or quality standard which can be measured and tested like for everyday items such as knives or power tools and won't exist for the immediate future. But that doesn't mean we should include disclaimers that hold you liable if somebody deletes their backups with your implementation of /bin/rm.
The interesting question then is if you need and want GPLv2 and Apache License 2.0 because they explicitly claim liability, does that mean you cannot use OpenSSH, OpenSSL or FreeBSD? Wouldn't you in that case be using an "illegal" tool like medicine from another continent?