Free Software at Risk Under Lemon law

mpawlo writes: "Newsforge published a piece I wrote on a lemon law for software. That is - what would happen if shrinkwrap limitation of liability clauses would be banned? I think Microsoft and the GNU Project would both suffer."

Comments

Re:Really?

[cscx]

No, you have it backwards. A well designed OS would not barf all over itself and dy because of a bad driver. The driver/device might fail, but the OS would chug right along.


Yeah, good thinking. Then we'd never see freezes like this, right?
---------

Unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at virtual address 00000016 printing eip: d18677ac
pgd entry c14a1000: 0000000000000000
pmd entry c14a1000: 0000000000000000
... pmd not present!
Oops: 0000
CPU: 0
EIP: 0010:[]
EFLAGS: 00010097
eax: 00000004 ebx: c78306b8 ecx: 00000006 edx: cfaf1b40
esi: 00000016 edi: c78306b8 ebp: c7830540 esp: c026ff14
ds: 0018 es: 0018 ss: 0018
Process swapper (pid: 0, stackpage=c026f000)
Stack: 00000000 00000004 00000000 00000016 cfaf1b40 00000046 00000987
000001a7
00000001 c7830400 00002710 c011daa8 00000246 00000000 c02ad5a0
003c0000
c5829da0 24000001 00000003 c026ffa8 c010a30a 00000003 c7830400
c026ffa8
Call Trace: [<c011d1a8>] [<c010a30a>] [<c010a488>] [<c0107240>] [<c0107240>]
[<c01090c4>] [<c0107240>]
[<c0107240>] [<c0100018>] [<c0107263>] [<c010722e2>] [<c0105000>]
[<c0100191>]

Code: f3 a6 0f 97 c2 c0 38 c2 0f 84 d4 fe ff ff ff 44 24 08
Kernel panic: Aiee, Killing interrupt handler!
In interrupt handler -- not syncing

--------

I am so sick of this elitist bullshit around here. Software crashes!! Get it? OK?? Nothing is completely immune, you know, humans write OSes, there's bound to be a few bugs here and there. When drivers run at Kernel Level, and they fuck up, that's when shit goes haywire.

That's the #1 reason Microsoft introduced "driver signing" in Windows 2000 and XP (and certification before that) --- to avoid shit like that. If the driver isn't certified by them, they're warning you, if shit goes wrong, it's your fault.

Re:Wouldn't Affect Free/Open Source Software

[raistlinne]

While IANAL, I did consult one about this once - when you give something away, you have no obligation to the recipient. Specifically, the recipient can't sue you if the product is defective in some manner.

IANAL either, but I did take a business law course taught by a lawyer. What you said is not quite true (at least not in NY state). When you give somebody something (not for any consideration), then you are not liable for negligence. However, you are liable for gross negligence. Gross negligence is defined as negligence which "shocks the conscience of the court".

My understanding is that it is very difficult to shock the conscience of the court, especially when you're giving something away for free. I suspect that as long as one doesn't knowingly include genuinely malicious code and keep quiet about it, that a software developer who gives away their code for free will be more than fine.

I suspect, though this is just a guess, that RedHat could probably take the position, as long as they made it clear to purchasers, that they are providing an installation and aggregation service, they are not actually selling the code that they didn't write. Thus they would be liable for bugs in the packaging or installation but not in the aggregated software. This would be reasonable, IMHO, and probably legally OK, too. Of course, that's just pure speculation on my part.