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UCITA Stalled At State Level
OscarGunther writes "Four states have passed anti-UCITA laws and Massachusetts may soon become the fifth. Meanwhile, only two states have adopted the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, which gives software vendors all the benefits and none of the burdens of the consequences of publishing their software. The details can be found at ComputerWorld and an opinion piece by Frank Hayes can be found here."
I hope a lot more pass those kind of laws...I mean if more than 2/3 of the states pass such laws there will be a bassis to build a constitutional amendment movement :-)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
This kind of stupidity is usually the kind of dumbness that lawyers love. Anybody who knows what they're doing in the computer industry knows that 127.0.0.1 is the IP address of "localhost" and isn't a real address of another installation, but apparently this company didn't. In a fair world, that company would owe actual damages for lost productivity due to this mistake, and maybe even punitive damages because what they did was just that stupid.
But, in the tech industry we're establishing the tradition that software is always going to be buggy, and software providers are just always going to be making mistakes and we're just going to have to tolerate them when they happen if we want to have software. Microsoft seems to rely on all of the "you promise not to sue us..." clauses in their EULA on a daily basis, even though their standard EULA hasn't really been tested with the kind of lawsuits that show whether all of their anti-liablity clauses are in fact valid. This is why software publishers want UCITA passed, so that they're sure their anti-liabity clauses are in fact going to hold up.
Their worse nightmare is a law that's the exact inverse of UCITA, one that would give customers the right to hold their software vendors liable whenever they screw up... but wouldn't that be the kind of thing that'd force software vendors to test before they ship?
On another note, I've stopped worrying about all the legislative garbage and contract trickery some large companies are spewing out. It does a fantastic job of convincing people that they are not looking to benefit the paying customer. It's going to kill them. Maybe not tomorrow, but if they don't ease up, everyone who doesn't hate them right now will. Just remember, whenever you try to corner the market and drive up prices, people will either use an alternative or stop using your product. Don't worry... they have plenty of rope to hang themselves with. They're just putting the finishing touches on the knot.
IAAL
Would you skydive with a parachute pre-packed and sold to you by some anonymous guy in a back alley?
For the same reasons no one should use an insulin pump that isn't guaranteed by a company.
If no guarantee is required to sell insulin pumps and a fellow chooses an insulin pump that is not guaranteed and it fails, he has only himself to blame (financial matters aside).
The issue is that guaranteeing something is an expensive process, just like getting an SLA for service quality you already have is most likely going to cost quite a bit. The UCITA would have you believe that a guarantee is free: it comes with every piece of software. This is not --- and should not be --- the case: I can't afford to guarantee my work, but I do promise to label my releases by how confident I am in them.
Unless, of course, you were to pay me. A lot of money. Then I could hire someone to do an outside code audit as well as do my own internal beefing up of a version I am confident in. And I could build a testing environment for it. And prove the algorithms correct. And get a custom machine built for it. That's what it takes to "guarantee" software.
The courts are all about interpretting the word "reasonable". Nobody says a small, cheap, software product has to be flawless. It just can't contain any unreasonable flaws that due care and attention would have caught.
As in, if the customer types in a bizarre string into the zipcode box and it crashes, this is probably reasonable for cheap software. If you sell it and it turns out that it can't save documents...
If you buy a car there's an implicit guarantee that it will function as a car. No guarantee about how reliable it'll be (past a certain point) or if it'll perform as the looks would suggest, but it had better get your from point A to B. If it doesn't, you can sue the company to refund your money, plus pay for the time you wasted trying to get the lemon to work.
Why should software be any different? If you sell a product that doesn't even function as promised on the back of the jewel case, why isn't that fraud? Just because it's a CD and not a device isn't a compelling argument in my opinion.