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Software Customer Bill of Rights
Cem Kaner of Badsoftware.com has written up a Software Customer Bill of Rights. Very appropriate considering our recent stories about Microsoft viruses, Dell's BIOS-clickwrap licensing agreement, etc.
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When has any product ever "lived" up to the marketing claims? If I expected everything I bought to live up to their claims, I'd be dissapointed with every bar of soap, every beer, and every Big Mac.
And that's not the way it should be. An ad shouldn't be able to tell me that a product is something when it's not. It is not my job to guess about what parts are lies.
I went to read this article thinking I would probably end up posting and saying that the US is too litigous, that it's dumb to have agreement upon agreement, even on the side of good, and that it was probably just a bunch of whiny rights.
What I found, though, was a simple, precise set of terms that are wholly agreeable. Nothing in that document is the least bit complicated or overbroad.
Let us see the contracts before we have to agree to them. Don't take away rights we already have, like criticism and reverse engineering, and first sale. If you know about serious bugs, tell us. Don't lie about what the product does.
That's pretty straightforward, and should not be the least bit damaging to anyone selling decent software.
This is also the America where consumers can ignore all of the information pummelled into them, make poor consumer choices, but then amazingly they can turn around and profess a child-like ignorance, actually suing because they should be protected from their own poor judgement.
Quality and security of software is a market feature, and if the public ignores the continual security lapses of some particularly popular software, for instance, and if they accept that there will be X crashes per week, then so be it: The marketplace has spoken. We don't need anyone protecting us from ourselves, and feigning ignorance after the fact is incredibly weak.