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Calling Software Reliability Into Question

Posted by timothy on from the late-to-the-party dept.

phillymjs writes "CNN is running a story on software reliability, and how the lack of it may cost more and more lives as technology creeps further into everyday products. It appears a debate is finally starting amongst everyday (read: non-geek) people about vendor liability for buggy software. Some opponents of the liability push are unsurprising: Says the story, 'Microsoft contends that setting [reliability] standards could stifle innovation, and the cost of litigation and damages could mean more expensive software.' The article also says, however, that consumers' favortism of flashy products over reliable ones is partly to blame for the current state of software."

2 of 412 comments (clear)

  1. Not just bad for MS, but FOSS too! by supton · · Score: 4, Informative
    Free and open-souce software are threatened by the idea of forcing liabillity on software, This has been discussed on ./ before.

    Remember, one thing M$ does well is pay lawyers.

  2. Re:Cutting Edge software - Debian? by egreB · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why can't there be a "cutting edge" in reliability?

    Because software needs to be thoroughly tested before it can be called reliable. "Cutting edge" software tends to be poorly (relativly speaking) tested, since it hasn't had that much time in the real world.

    Therefore, for instance, Debian stable still uses kernel 2.2 by default (alltough there's a 2.4 installation flavour), because it's well tested and reliable. As a result, I've never experienced inconsistency or crashes with a Debian stable release.

    (Now, if you want cutting edge Debian, there's always Debian Sid (also known as unstable)).