What's (Still) Wrong With UCITA

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 7, 2002 @01:23AM from the new-dress-on-an-old-hag dept.

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.

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Re:warranties!? by bjschrock · 2002-08-07 01:40 · Score: 2, Informative

AFAIK, most software is without warranty.

I thought so too, but I just got some software that had a "limited warranty" on it. It came with my 3Com 802.11b card, and I was a little shocked when I found there was a "Software" section on the limited warranty card. The software did also come with a EULA, but the warranty actually said the software was guaranteed to provide reasonable functionality to the user (which is pretty basic, but at least they "guarantee" it). It's not much, but it's better than nothing.