At the top of this discussion parent to where I said “software is not food”

> If I give away food I have a duty not to poison you. It doesn’t matter you didn’t pay for it.

First, I’ll start with the loaded language here: “duty not to poison you.” Yes, duh, no matter what, intentional poisoning is a crime. But the phrase is “not to poison you” which I interpreted to mean that we are taking about harm mitigation/prevention rather than intentional crime.

In that context it very much does matter if the relationship is giving away food for free in a private home versus selling or giving away food in public.

If we are to consider Neovim to line up with the “giving away food for free at my backyard cookout” analogy, they have a more relaxed standard of care. We don’t go to a BBQ and expect the hosts to have training from the department of health and signs that say “employees must wash hands before returning to work.” In this sense, Neovim would say, “hey, we did our best, we tried to make good software but this condition caused it to fuck up your files. Sorry.”

If we are considering Neovim to line up with “McDonald’s giving away free hamburgers for national hamburger day,” then now we have to recognize that the software industry does not involve nearly as much regulation as McDonald’s. Neovim’s story doesn’t change: “hey, sorry, we did our best, …” but McDonald’s doesn’t have that same standard of operation. Whether or not the hamburgers are free they have to get all the same licenses, do all the same training, and make their employees keep all the meats to temperature and all of that.

There’s no regulation around the general quality of software. You don’t have a strong claim to damages if your software crashes or causes problems. The remediation for problems like that is accomplished via SLAs in the business world, which obviously nobody has with Neovim. They’re just providing software as-is with no warranty or guarantee of quality or fit for purpose (#7 in the license agreement) and they’ve even been nice enough to provide the code ahead of time so you can audit it.

So unless someone at Neovim is in an evil lair declaring that they want to delete stuff on purpose to fuck up your day, there’s really not much of a logical case for their negligence here. It was provided at no cost, there are no significant legal regulations on software quality, they offered the code so you can inspect it, and they warned you in the license that it is provided with no guarantees or promises.

This concept of “duty of care” doesn’t exist in the software world, as much as we might prefer it to really exist.