Like I don’t understand why this even became a thing and who even thought of it?
In: Economics
The legal history behind this is a bit complicated, but the simple version is that it has to do with intellectual property law.
See, because there’s (usually) nothing stopping you from just copying software that you have on your hard drive and sending it to everyone you know, companies that want to protect their copyrights, trademarks, or patents on their software can’t just relinquish full ownership of the software to you. Due to legal precedent, this has resulted in a legal situation where the software vendor has to give you explicit permission to use the software via a license. As a tradeoff, the company is required to assume liability and offer warranties unless they explicitly disclaim them as part of the license terms. In the past (like early 80s at the latest) this wasn’t the case because software wasn’t covered by copyrights, but the law has changed considerably since then.
*EDIT:* I should note for the sake of completeness that none of this applies to software that’s been released into the public domain in the United States. Some jurisdictions hold that the public domain doesn’t exist for complicated philosophical reasons, though, so even in the case of public domain software it’s generally advised to include some kind of license like the [Unlicense](https://unlicense.org) or [CC0](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) for safety’s sake.
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