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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.
Everyone else on the planet are responsible for their products and services. The software industry is just spoiled.
And about the issue about open source, CHARGE. It IS free as in speech and not beer after all so make sure you charge enough for taking your responsibility.
I don't agree with the argument in the article that commercially-packaged Free Software being sold alongside other commercial software should have to abide by the same warranty obligation of commercial software (which is essentially worthless at the 90-day limit EULAs set, but that's beside the point.) Actually, this type of restriction would seem to put a damper on massive bundling of free/cheap software as well as game companies dumping old games in the bargain bins, as warranty obligations can get pretty expensive. This could use a bit of rethinking.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Amend the UCITA so that all software sold is required either:
- to provide a warranty, or
- to provide full open access to the source code so the user may modify it as they see fit.
completely at the pleasure of the software author or vendor."Provided by the management for your protection."
"AFAIK, most software is without warranty. Even windows. "
Thats the problem... The customers shouldn't be required to take this shit. If you make a product available you should be responsible for it. Everyone else is.
We all know software is more complex than a microwave for example but there must still be basic resposibilities either way.
The cost that those resposibilities has should be considered when the price is set on the produt.
Maybe requiring to have a warranty *option* *available* would be more feasible. Vendors
could sell (or give away) unwarrantied versions,
and sell warrantied versions, for consumers that
demanded them. The price difference would be up to the vendor.
If the limit of one's *LIABILITY* under the warranty was the cost
of the software license - then we'd be OK.
* OpenSource Software authors charge $0 for their code,
so their liability is $0. There is a warranty - but it's
practical impact is zero.
* RedHat et al charge for the cost of putting free software
onto physical media - but the software is still free so
long as it can still be freely redistributed. So their
liability is only for the non-free parts of their distro.
That's also fine by me - it gives them an incentive to
keep their distro's squeaky-clean and freely distributable.
* Microsoft suffer horribly because whenever WORD crashes,
I can demand to be refunded the entire cost of the package.
They'd go bust *very* quickly - which is fine by me!
* Large software companies that produce reasonably reliable
code and charge reasonable amounts of money for it are
under great incentive to write code that (whilst it may
not be 100% bug-free) is sufficiently reliable that they
won't get significant numbers of warranty returns.
Good!
If the limit of liability is the cost of the *damage* done by
bad software then it's not just the OpenSource world that'll
be out of business - it would be hard to imagine *ANY* generic
software such as operating systems, compilers, word processors
surviving the barrage of law suits that would immediately result.
Bring it on I say!
www.sjbaker.org
Idemnify authors of public domain information against civil legal threat arising from the work itself or derivative works.
That's why the UCB, MIT, and CMU Licenses exist in the first place, rather than the code being placed in the public domain.
If you want to control your code after the fact, fine: accept the liablity associated with doing that, as your cost for the payment of being granted that control. The sole reason most University developed code in these cases is not in the public domain is that a license was required to obtainlegal indemnification.
I don't think this would keep people from releasing under the (L)GPL or Artistic License or MPL, or SCSL, etc., if they felt the control they got by affixing the license was worth the cost.
-- Terry
Software used to come with warranties. When I first started work, the mainframe software had bugs but the supplier was contracted to fix (or provide work arounds) for any problems we encountered. Granted, we had to pay for this and the time to fix (and thus the priority given by the supplier) depended on the severity of impact to our business.
Most suppliers now make you wait, and pay, for the next version upgrade in order to get bugs fixed. So what would be wrong, both for closed and open source, software suppliers to provide a waranty to fix (genuine) bugs in a timely manner. To a great extent the open source community already does this. It often does not take long between a (serious) bug or security problem being reported and a fix being published.
but it will cost a lot more...
Take cars for example, it's possible for a big company like GM to create a new car in a couple of weeks. But they have to give a warranty on it, and they have to make certain that the car is safe. So they spend months and months of testing the car in every immaginable way. They have to be sure that the car will be free from serious defects for at least the lenght of the warranty, but more than that for the safety (or they'll have costly recalls!).
You can do the same with software, where I work the testing time is often 3 to 4 times longer than the time it took to develop the program. So you have projects that took 1 month to make but 3 months to test. That's expensive but a bug in calculating interests for example can be a lot more expensive than that if you discover it a couple of years later!
Try it! Library of Babel
No of course not since these events could not have been forseen. Or at least not by anyone who does not live in hollywood.
Most software faults occur because of mismatch between products, bad configuration or improper use. Responsible programmers and most are will of course attempt to test their work first but they are only human. They can not be asked to predict every possible situation that may cause their program to fail. If you think otherwise please list them all for you're most popular piece of software.
Most bugs in software can only be getting rid of by testing it in the wild in customers, you youreselve say so. How exaclty should this be done if the testers can sue for any bugs?
You would envision a world where nothing can be released before it has been proven 100% safe. The world would be very boring indeed if this ever happened. But lets agree on a happy medium, a great big yellow sticker on all open source software.
Warning, product when installed will consume space on HD of more then 0 bytes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
At first I thought that nobody would win with software warranties, but then I realized that Microsoft would. They could weather the legal storm, whereas Linux couldn't.
In reality though, there could be no warranty. It would be so jam-packed with disclaimers it would basically be useless. Bumper to bumper warranty my ass - read the fine print.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Doctors continue to be terrible when it comes to disclosing what the drugs they proscribe do and when they will fail to work. I can't get my doctor to say things like, "well there are 9 possibilities here: a with probability 85%, b with probability 4%..... i with probability .0007%". I think the cost of testing is too high to justify checking for anything other than a vs. b so I'm going to test for b and if that fails assume you have a. etc...
Why doesn't every dermitologist have a book with common skin diseases and a description of the possible treatments they could give it to the patient "read chapter 7 to understand the possiblities and we'll talk tomorrow to decide what you want to do". Similarly with Cartiologists, etc...
"So if I write software today, should I guarentee that it will work will ALL previous versions of Windows with ANY hardware configuration as well as any future versions of both hardware and the OS?"
Simply specify which OS version it will work on, and peg it down to that version. As for hardware incompatability, that's just lousy code.
"I welcome YOU to the real world. You obviously don't write software for a living."
Actually I do, and I have yet to write software that doesn't work as expected. I certainly don't release production code untill I absolutely know it will work as expected.
"My responsibilities include things like paying bills, for which I need to work for a company that will stay around because they aren't getting sued into oblivion because some customer was stupid enough to open the program's data files in Wordpad and save them back as formatted text. Because that same customer will never admit they did that and if there aren't logfiles showing they did such a thing, you may still have to defend yourself in court, and that costs money."
If the customer does that then it's their problem just as if I took my car off road it would be my problem. Warranties don't cover misuse. Sure, defense costs money, but a countersuit for legal fees would be in order.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM