What's (Still) Wrong With UCITA

Grant Gross has an article at NewsForge outlining both changes being proposed by the The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws to its version of UCITA (a model intended for adoption by the various state legislatures), and objections raised to the resulting language by Red Hat lawyer Carol Kunze. Among other things, Kunze points out that Free software projects could be effectively discouraged from releasing software if software producers are required to provide warranties -- imagine trying to provide warranties on all the packages available to Debian users, for instance, or every bit of software included with Mandrake Linux.

Comments

Warrenty Example

[TibbonZero]

Perhaps this could work in our favor;

By the time you have read this warrenty, or installed the product, your warrenty is null and void. You could call us, but we won't pick up the phone. :)

It's almost as good as Microsoft's

Re:Provide Warranties

[yatest5]

How can you provide a warranty against bugs when you have teenagers from all over the world making random changes to your codebase on Sourceforge?

1. Give away shoddy free software, written by teenagers from all over the world making random changes to your codebase.
2. Offer paid-for warranty / support
3. Profit!!