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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.
You can disclaim these warrantees (see above), but that requires an explicit agreement between the consumer and the vendor, in the form of an EULA or click wrap installer.
See, this was the problem with the UCITA as originally proposed. And it has not been fixed. It creates a default warranty for software, complete with (IIRC) default damages for bugs, security flaws, etc. Now, this would be a good thing if the damages were based on the cost of the software, which they aren't. Or if the law also didn't explicitly allow software companies to completely escape from the warranty with a tiny little clause in the presented-on-install click-through EULA... Which, incidentally, means that there's no way for most free software to disclaim warranty without compromising morals or functionality.
I'm all in favour of disposing of the practice of warranty-less software... As long as everyone has to play by the same rules. This law doesn't do that. It lets proprietary, potentially-illegal-EULA employing software companies get off the hook, while dumping a huge burden on hobbiests and those who look to freely share software. If anyone's exempted from warranty requirements, it should be those building software in their spare time, not those selling it with utterly mindboggling profit margins.