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Why Can't Microsoft be Sued Under the Lemon Law?
briant97 asks: "Microsoft is sitting back making all this money by charging for desktop and server operating systems. If you go for a server, they also add additional charges through client access licenses. Well, now that they've charged you all this money they leave their software open to viruses and exploits beyond belief, which will cost your company even more money. When will it stop? When will Microsoft become liable for their actions? I mean they are making billions while costing other companies billions. Ford, Chevy, and all other car manufactures get held liable if they make a defective product, why not Microsoft?" One can argue that you sign away your right to seek damages from Microsoft, by agreeing to the EULA, however there is still this issue as to the strength of a EULA since they've never been tested in court. How do you feel about this subject? Should software owners be allowed to "sign" away their basic rights via click-thru licensing, or should software manufacturers be liable for the critical defects that show up in their software?
My first guess would be because the "Lemon Law" only covers cars.
From http://www.mylemon.com/faq.htm:
What types of products are covered by the Lemon Law ?
All motor vehicles primary used for personal use are covered under the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Lemon Law.
symetrix. We are building a religion, a limited edition.
I'm also feeling addicted to Windows. And they pushed this on me when I was a kid.
Just like smoking.
Just remeber, if Microsoft is held liable for it's products in spite of the EULA, it's only a matter of time before other software comapanies and eventually open source authors will be sued for the same. Are you really so eager to jump headlong into the new world of software liability litigation?
Microsoft is a Lime. (Obscure _stretched_ reference to Harry Lime).
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
because software is traded "as is" - first of all, there is no transfer of property, so there is no sale, hence most consumer protection laws don't apply. Second, consumer protection law is there to protect you being fooled by dishonest tradespeople. Since it is sold "as is", and moreover, since the only people left on this planet that don't know that Windows is a stinking pile of crap is some lost tribe in the dark jungle of borneo, you can't really claim to have been tricked now, can you?
Just don't buy it to begin with.....
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
well for one thing, my server is not going to hurtle out of control and kill a bus load of nuns if it's defective.
Well now that they've charged you all this money they leave [their] software open to viruses and exploits beyond belief, which will cost your company even more money.
you're preaching to the choir here. tell it to the stupid old men in upper management who decide how your company spends/wastes its money.
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
At least, the makers of proprietary software should be (not just Microsoft specifically), since if you can see the source you can check it yourself so it's as much your fault if it goes wrong.
As an example of why software makers should be held liable, imagine a nuclear power plant being run by some OS. Now imagine that OS has a bug which causes it to crash if certain conditions are met. Now imagine those conditions are met one day, causing the cooling system in the reactor to stop working as it should. I think we all know what happens next...
EULA's shouldn't be able to take away a consumer's basic rights as many basically do these days. If you buy a product you expect it to work as advertised and not be defective. It seems only software companies are able to get away with selling defective products by tacking on long EULA's to them. Why don't car companies tack EULA's onto their vehicles saying if it's defective, you're SOL? Because nobody would put up with it, they'd go find another car without one. Nobody would put up with that on about any other product except software. I strongly agree people should stop letting software companies shove defective software down their throats. I say people challenge EULA's at all *reasonable* opportunity... EULA's should simply be an agreement that you're not going to reverse engineer their product or distribute it illegally and such....not forcing you into agreeing that the software is probably defective and that you're going to be the one paying out your ass for it.
If software had to live up to safety standards the same way physical products did, the authors of the software could be sued just like the makers of the physical products.
"But that's great!" you say. "Microsoft could be sued until they were just bits of blackened rubble!"
Yes, that would be wonderful.
Now, what about the floating-point exception handler bug in Linux? Well, looks like we'd have to sue Linus et al.
I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft would take a lot longer to reduce to rubble than Linus and his ragtag crew of happy software authors.
Even if you limit it only to software that's charged for, well, then, good bye RedHat. Ditto Mandrake. Bye SuSe. It's all over.
Basically, if the authors could be sued, then there would be no software industry.
I know the question was also asking why they couldn't be sued for allowing viruses in. Well, why can't Ford be sued for letting me drive my car on roads? There are *wrecks* on roads! What is Ford thinking??
The point of this whole rant is: Software is far, far to complex to be held to the same standards as physical products. Mankind has been making physical products for around 200,000 years now (if not more). We've been making software for 50. Let's wait until we have the same kind of experience making these products before we hold them to the same standard.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
Isn't a License Agreement what protects the developers of GPL'ed software from being sued as well.
Given, the GPL is not a EULA (End User License Agreement) -- the GPL only takes effect if you modify or distribute the application -- it still seems if it was tested and failed in court, it could have a big impact on OSS.
What do you think?
Any attack on click-through licensing means that open source software is more open to the same legal punishments. If someone found a disasterous bug in Linux, would people have a right to sue Linux,OSDL, etc.? I bloody hope not.
Now the problem is that companies buying software don't require full guarantees. If the DOD says this software must be perfect, then its the onus on the Seller to supply that guarantee.
This allows for open source companies to guarantee software without forcing every Linux distributor to get hit with the lawsuits.
Bye!
When desktop and corporate customers are willing to wait 10 years for products that incorporate new technology, we can talk.
Microsoft is being no more negligent than their competitors would be. Businesses recognize the risk of using Microsoft, Apple, Sun, third-party or OSS software, and balance that against their need to actually use recent innovations. The end result, a fast life-cycle on development and rather unreliable products. Businesses suffer losses when software is compromised, but that's built into the cost of getting software years before it could be released otherwise.
If consumer advocacy laws applied to software development right now, you'd see innovation plummet. What few developers that would bother with top-notch reliability (which is comparitively boring) would still take years to create something after the idea was publically announced.
Meanwhile, some black market developers would create the same function in some illegal and wholly unsupported product, but businesses would buy it up like crazy.
The reason that these kinds of regulations are important with cars and pharmaceuticals is that these industries put people at risk to their lives. A flaw in a car will kill people. A flaw in software will cost a company some money, but is a threat that can be overcome through market practices. The company insures against damage, pays a premium, and gets reimbursed on loss. Nobody dies. Big fricking deal.
Businesses where reliability does matter (i.e. infrastructure and medical projects) go further and independently make sure they only use software that has gone through the ropes. This software tends to evolve more slowly, or else has a disproportionate amount of money thrown against it to speed things up.
How can I as a software developer take responsibility for loses when i use libraries etc that wont? oh and it would kill oss, you could say this code is just text that happens to compile, but unless everyone compiles thier own software, it'd never work.
I'd rather be willing to explore the possibilities to sue people who make decisions to license half-assed products, waste additional money on AV software and man hours to keep holes closed, employ incompetent administrators which results in wasting everybody's money and time when Internet links get totally clogged and so on.
I can't see it happening thou. Those same people are FUD masters as well - if they are not, how else would they justify decisions to pay for Windows to whoever approves spending?
When you go buy a car, you expect it to not break. When you go buy Windows, you know it will break. Would you go buy a car with breaks you know will fail while you're out driving?
Think of it like a car.
My 1998 Honda had a problem with the ignition that, if a certain combination of environmental factors, driving habits, and the phases of the moon and planets all combined correctly, the contacts would corrode under the extreme voltage and cut power to the engine while in operation. Their response: Take the car to a dealer to have the ignition switch replaced free of charge.
I.e.: This otherwise safe and well designed car has a small flaw that under certain conditions may manifest itself in a potentially annoying to potentially dangerous way, depending on what you are doing.
Now, let's pretend it is a computer.
Your well-engineered and hardened security Windows 2003 Server system has a flaw in a protocol parser that allows, with the right combination of messsages, someone to cause code to be executed on your system.
In other words: This otherwise safe and well designed server operating system has a flaw which, depending on several factors, may manifest itself in an annoying or dangerous way.
Any complex system is going to have problems with it. Millions of lines of code, or hundreds of thousands of moving or conductive parts, each can have something fail if there's a tiny problem with it.
Microsoft releases their fixes free of charge, just like a dealer service recall on an automobile.
What's the problem here? You can eliminate 95% of these vaunerabilities by simply *not running without a firewall* and *not running unneeded services* which is (GASP) something you'd do on Linux as well. Linux is just as vaunerable if it's sitting open and unprotected on a network with 500 services running as root. Would you do that? No. So why do you do it with a Windows box?
If it's because Windows is more of a "turn-key" solution, and the user doesn't think to secure their box, it's not Microsoft's fault, the blame rests surely in USER ERROR.
Lets first talk about supported hardware configurations.
Before I would allow certain liabilities like this, I would require a given supported configuration. Lets say something like a Pentium 4 processor running at 3Ghz - without HyperThreading, A Chipset, a single graphics card (make it old too), a single hard disk from one manufacturer - the list goes on (well in reality - the list doesn't go on). Your hardware isn't in the supported configuration (You did buy directly from Dell didn't you ?) forget the support, it isn't a tested and qualified system.
Software configuration
You weren't going to install ANY other software on your system, other than mine... How do I know that THAT software didn't cause the problem - so nix any software purchases - or that will void the warantee as well.
So basically you end up with a supported system, that is completely useless. Not much fun at all. And you WANT to have this happen by getting lawyers involved ?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
It would be a real killer for software in general if developers were liable for damages caused from malfunctioning code. Therefore, licenses that disclaim warranties are really important.
If there were enough demand for it, you'd expect software companies that are developing for pay to warranty their code. This would be one area where they could clearly outperform free-beer software! But I don't think such demand is very high, except in certain niche industries (defense, transportation, etc. although I think we'd be kidding ourselves if we thought that these areas are much better off than regular consumer/business software.)
Anyway, this really has nothing to do with Microsoft -- lord knows that there are and have been plenty of bad bugs in non-Microsoft software. (Even "open source" software!)
You know, I didn't think anyone remembered The Third Man... but if you know who Harry Lime is, you might really appreciate a book I just finished reading for about the tenth time in twenty years or so (yeah, I like it that much). It's an offbeat spy thriller/romance called Lime's Crisis by novelist/screenwriter Ronald Bass. Wonderful read. Cheers!
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Ever check how much doctors pay for malpractice insurance? It's in the 6 digits for some specialties. Just think what would happen when small software companies start getting sued because of bugs in their code that lead to others making expensive mistakes. Lots of companies would be driven out of business and the only ones that would be left standing would be the ones with the deepest pockets, i.e. Microsoft. Then they would say "we are paying out all these huge damage awards, so we have to raise the base price on windows to $1000 / copy".
...
Maybe that's a bit extreme. Seriously, software is way more complex than a car. Who among you would bet your entire net worth that you haven't shipped code with potentially serious bugs in it? There are always bugs.
Maybe a mandatory "your money back if you aren't satisfied" law would fly. But 99% of the people who take advantage of that offer are going to keep a backup copy of the software, "just in case"
This idea could never get past the unanimous opposition of every company in the software industry. Just live with it - software has bugs. If you don't like it switch to another package or just go back to pencil and paper.
You don't expect a car dealership to be liable if your engine siezes because you never changed the oil.
The patches and exploits are handled as they arise and if you keep up with the maintenance than you wont suffer catastrophic failure.
Sure this is a bit of a stretch but you have to take some damn responsibility. You can't blame MS for all your woes.
They make a good product that keeps the majority on the road. Every generation has new features and new flaws. The fact is the flaws are publicized and you have an opportunity to patch them.
The time and money spent is part of the upkeep. It is like oil in an engine... if you never maintain it it will fail. It will leave you stranded and up a creek with a very expensive repair.
However, when maintained you get acceptable operation.
Quit your mindless bitching! Blame the Virus Writers for writing the viruses. Patch your system be it MS, *nix or whatever. Take some damn responsibility and stop blaming everyone else.
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
DJB seems to favor the consumer in the EULA debate.
This has been discussed before, in the thread about the release of QNX 6.3. The people who run nuclear plants usually end running software that's not meant to be used in such situations anyway - the clause is more about liability than anything else. Also, the safety aspect of nuclear reactors are controlled by nothing more than a few analog gauges, to ensure best chance of surviving a failure. The OS used for monitoring can be just about anything. The thread is here.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
If this were the case, you could sue $developer for $foss_project.
This sig no verb.
Microsoft software or law suit abuse. It would not stop with Microsoft. It may involve other companies and even free software. If MS's liability disclaimer is invalid, so would be the one in free software.
And am I the only one to point out that this article is stupid and with no redeeming quality? First of all, it tries to apply a legal term to software that doesn't really apply to software. Next, it's a blatant, biased attack against a single company, like they are the only ones who ever published bad software.
Third, lemon law says you can get your money back. Guess what, you can get a refund on your software.
At least in the US anyone can sue anyone for anything. Winning however is difficult. Still, if you think you have a case call a lawyer and present it. If you really do have one, lawyers are good at filling in the details. Details like perhaps lemons laws are not the right path in your state where some other law is better.
Warning: not anyone can win a lawsuit. And you can be counter sued. Still slashdot is not the place to ask, most of us (such as me) are not lawyers, so we aren't aware of everything.
Even if EULAs are valid (which as others have noted is not tested), nearly all states will not allow you to sign away some rights. Might help you in itself. (if nothing else why test the EULA if the clause they are using isn't valid in your state)
There is one more downside: you have to deal with lawyers. No matter how evil you call Microsoft, lawyers are worse! Only sue if it is really worth it.
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/warranty/
97 comments were filed publicly. Everyone from RMS to IEEE to, well, me.
Basically, software warranties would make Free Software illegal. The model wouldn't work if we were held to quality expectations. Read the comments to educate yourself.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Yesterday : If life hands you lemons, make lemonade.
Today : If life hands you lemons, sue the bitch.
Being called a dork on Slashdot must be like being called the retard in special ed.
There are two ways to look at this, and trust me, they're being looked at.
What this is all about is whether Microsoft is really costing people money or not. Why would Microsoft cost you money? Because you *had* to install or use their often defective products. Because you had no choice. So, two ways to look at it.
1) You have no choice. Linux simply doesn't do what Windows can. I don't agree with this but then this is what the parent is suggesting. Is the open source community letting us down? Besides, since we have no choice but to use Windows (and they are legally recognised as having a monopoly), we can already see that the DoJ has forced remedy on them for the whole antitrust thing. So the clear course of action is to take them to court.
2) You do have a choice. You can install Linux or BSD. These operating systems do most of the same things Windows does, and cheaper. Now, what if there is a bug in Linux. That would mean that, in theory, Linux should also be applicable to the Lemon Law, and you should be able to sue the provider/author, in the case of a bug. Now, Linux is floating around the version 2.8.x area. Surely some of the fixes between 1.0 and 2.8.x were bug fixes? In which case we have to accept that Linux may still have flaws, which although less than Windows ones, still makes Linux and OS developers fair game for Lemon Law litigation, which they can ill afford compared with MS.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
Here's the thing. Well, here are the things--there are two of them.
- $developer can be sued for $foss_project today. You can be sued for eating a ham sandwich. You can be sued for putting a detailed account of felonies on your webpage. The only way to be lawsuit-proof is to die, and even then, your estate can be sued.
- If I tell you "hey, I wrote this, and I'm giving it to you for free without any reciprocation from you, but I'm not making any guarantees it'll work," that's a boatload different in the eyes of the law from me telling you "hey, I wrote this, and for $10,000 and the souls of your children I'll let you use it, but I'm not making any guarantees it'll work".
Have you ever heard of Good Samaritan laws? Some state legislatures got tired of hearing of frivolous lawsuits filed against people who came onto the scene of an accident, gave emergency care in good faith and for no cost at all, only to have the person whose life they saved turn around and slap them with a malpractice suit. This was considered to be so beyond the pale that both the courts, via common law, and the legislatures, via statute law, moved to smack it down.So this entire "software needs to be without liability, because otherwise we could be sued!" is nonsense. We can already be sued. What can't happen, at least assuming EULAs are valid and we're all using a EULA that disclaims liability, is we can't be sued successfully. And even if EULAs are held invalid and software liability becomes the rule, we're still not likely to be sued. Read on.
If software finally becomes subject to the same requirements of any other manufactured good, we're going to see commercial software companies (like Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell, etc.) spending a lot of money doing bughunting, bugfixing, and documenting failures; and we're going to see both common and statute law exempting no- or low-cost free software from software liability.
Some developers use license agreements which specifically state that the software *is* guaranteed to perform a particular function to a certain standard.
Have any of those developers been sued for bugs or defects?
Or is it the case that those developers do genuinely work to produce quality software while, as one might assume, the ones who disclaim all warranties are the ones who produce faulty products?
- Software that costs, say, $40.00 or more to license,
- does NOT fall under a free/open compliant license, making it possible for the user to audit the code WITHOUT paying additional fees for access to a human-readable, non-shrouded copy of the code,
- and which is required for the performance of personal or business goals.
It would NOT cover software selling for less than $40.00, and would NOT cover strictly frivolous and unnecessary software such as games, pr0n software, purely eye-candy software, and other things not necessary to earn one's living or to generate business revenues. (Yeah yeah, game testers, but the definition of a software tester is one who takes the risk of losing data or opening oneself up to security flaws in the testing of software, so that would not apply either.) It would not cover scripts or other code that is human readable. It would not cover software used under a license provided for evaluation, such as a shareware license, or try-before-you-buy, when the damage occured before licensing said software for the $40.00 or more license fee. Basically use your common sense and figure out what I'm trying to say here.Microsoft and all the other vendors out there would be forced to either:
- Reduce the price of their software to $39.95, or...
- Make their software bulletproof to avoid getting the shit sued out of them.
Of course, you'd have to prove actual damages, and that the software in question is at fault for the damage--that is, that the damage would not have occured but for the existance of a flaw in the software. So if your RAM is fucked and a bit goes stray and the damn thing writes over your database because of that, you're fucked, not the software maker.Now, how in the fuck do you avoid frivolous lawsuits? Hmmmm... Maybe just make the law apply to Microsoft and to nobody else.
When you are developing a consumer product, whether electronic or not, there are usually a very limited number of modes of interaction between the user and the device, and generally a very well-defined, firmly specified set of data it operates on. Testing and making sure it works properly is relatively easy - you don't worry about whether somebody has a Voodoo 8 Extreme graphics card or Kingston 1-bit-weird RAM or the strange USB dongle that overrides the standard Windows drivers with their own DRM-enabled gunk. Product lifecycles are much longer, it may take anywhere from 8 to 36 months to get a product to market depending on its nature, and it is expected to have a shelf life of several years to earn back all the R&D costs and make a profit.
Anyway, if my device that plugs into a wall socket and has an on/off switch blows up and burns somebody's house down, it's pretty clear who's at fault - either the people that designed it, or the people that manufactured/assembled it. If my software fails, there's often no way to say whose "fault" it really is - was it the hardware assembler? The video card manufacturer with their flawed drivers? The OS developer with their crappy architecture? The spyware bundler that stuck destabilizing software on the system? Or the application developer who wrote an app that worked fine on all the systems they did QA on, but mysteriously failed in some unanticipated configuration?
Even ignoring these problems, we still have the issue of short product lifecycles, lots of feature-based competition, version warfare, and so on. They all occur in most product businesses, but at nowhere near the rate and intensity as in the software industry. And when it comes down to it, the people who buy software for personal use and often for businesses too, consistently prove they value ooh-ahh features and version numbers at least as much as, if not more than stability and security.
Ironically, this lemon law stuff usually comes from frustrated software developers, not consumers. The developers hate the fact that their companies' marketing or sales people force them to release products too early, in unfinished or untested forms and then they get blamed for the fallout. Usually this is the result of poor project management and the inability to accurately assess tradeoffs between featurization, release schedules, and financing prior to setting out on the project and prior to beginning development. Know what you're building before you build it, or make sure you have lots of time and money.
I'm sure CmdrTaco wouldn't like being liable for revenue lost due to a critical failure of his GPL's Slash code.
And I'm sure that Apache developers would think twice about contributing anything.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
...but the virus EULA gave the creator the rights to destroy my data and steal my credit cards!
How many _minutes_ would it take our Redmond *friends* before they started suing everyone else? Considering their operating system is being torn to bits, they'd probably take their entire development staff, and turn it on to the open source products out there. Rip and shred and find every little hole they could find, install, then sue. A very SCO-esqe move of "We're losing money, sue everyone possible".
For example there are: Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX and Apple OS/X on the desktop and server. Yes some are more suited to being one or the other, but they all work. Depending on who you get them from and under which terms you get varying degrees of support.
There are probably others too, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head before my full caffeine fix.
Really, it's time we as a society voted with our feet, so to speak. In the last 12 months, I know many people who have bought Apple laptops and are absolutely delighted. OK they're engineers, but their enthusiasm is filtering down to less technically-savvy friends and family. One guy I know bought his mum an ipod. She liked it so much, and was so fed up with Windows falkiness and viruses that she replaced her PeeCee with an Apple iBook. I'm a Linux and Solaris guy myself. We don't do Windows at home. My wife is a technophobe and an English techer. She uses GNOME on Slackware with absolutely no problems at all. It doesn't exhibit any of the weird behaviour that Windows does, it runs on prehistoric hardware (K6-2/500) quite nicely and doesn't get viruses. OpenOffice.org is good enough for her word processing needs. It reads and writes all the M$ Turd files she needs for work (and most of the teachers have a clue now and use PDFs anyway)...
So what excuse do you have for still using Windows? Why look to regulation to change things? Why not bring about the change yourslef?
Stick Men
Don't pay the money to have someone harden your Apache webserver for your prominent commercial site and see how long it takes it to be defaced or converted into a porn server.
Windows machines don't just suddenly spawn viruses. Comparing Windows viruses to Pinto fires implies that somehow, when Windows bluescreens, it sends millions of malicious packets out into the Internet. Ropy as Windows is, it doesn't do that.
What might be a closer analogy would be the problems that Renault had about five or six years ago with a certain model. On turbo-diesel versions, the air intake to the air filter was mounted low down on the front, below the radiator grille. Now, quick auto mechanics lesson - I'll be brief - diesel engines don't have a throttle. Speed is controlled by restricting the amount of fuel entering the cylinder, but the airflow is always unrestricted. Unlike petrol engines, where the mixture is critical, diesel engines should always have excess air. The upshot of this is that even at idle, a diesel engine is drawing enormous amounts of air (ever seen a diesel car exhaust blowing 1/4" gravel about in a car park?) - and with that air, anything suspended in the air. In the UK, we have a lot of wet weather, and the water would get drawn into the engine when you went through even quite shallow puddles. They had to recall all the cars to replace the air intakes for ones that pick air up from nearer the top of the engine compartment, and replaced a couple of hundred car engines damaged by water ingestion.
OK - this is another bad analogy, because unlike Microsoft, Renault actually fixed the problems their bad design had caused.
Open source advocates need to think long and hard before lobbying for legislative action aimed at Microsoft. The mandate of a lemon law is unlikely to be constrained to only Microsoft.
Any legislation mandating performance and security standards for software, or allowing its users to bring suit against the people that developed and distribute it, will likely be aimed at open source, as well as other non-MS commercial products. (If not intially, certainly rather soon. A lemon law targetting only MS is no more likely than a lemon law targetting only General Motors.)
Bottom line, then: If users can sue Microsoft, they can sue open source developers, too.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
There is a huge difference between virus/exploits and bugs and the lemon law. The Lemon Law applies to defects in the design and manufacture of a product, not necessarily to outside attack. A virus/exploit is comparable to someone breaking into your car. There is no way you can ever sue under Lemon Law because some robber found an exploit in your window that allows it to be broken by rocks and discarded toilets.
The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act is what gave force to shrinkwrap disclaimers of product liability. Under UCITA, a customer can't sue for damages exceeding the price of the product. If a person disagrees with the liscense, they are supposed to ask for a refund, which must be given under the law. (I tried this, and neither the store nor Macromedia would honor this. The 'cannot be used for commercial purposes' restriction on my educational-discount copy of flash, which wasn't made known until I tried to install the product, rendered the program absolutely useless to me. It was like having a bike and, after buying it, being told the company would prosecute me if I tried to ride it.)
Virginia was the first state to pass UCITA. Probably no small coincidence that AOL is headquartered there.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The main problem is not so much the cars are broken.
At any point of time almost all cars on the road have problems, usually the problems aren't fatal/critical.
And often the reason why the cars on the road have problems is not mainly because of the car maker but because of the car owner/operator.
Then there are the people who go around vandalizing cars.
Remember you arent actually purchasing anything when you license software, its just a "right to use". ( and you have the option to stop using and give up those rights.. )
I would imagine that the way the laws are written today, you have to actually own something to have it considered for the "lemon laws"..
You also sign away much of the responsibility that the software maker has when you agree to 'use', which may negate any option anyway..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The part of the problem is that, whether it be Microsoft or Linux; it is not possible to make software 100% bug-free. Period.
Unlike Cars, each and every customer of Microsoft/Open-Source-Software for a particular product gets the exact same product. They run on a vast variety of Hardware/Firmware combinations, all of which is impossible to track for any one company or open source community. Even if Microsoft or Open-Source-Software could (hypothetically) create 100% bug-free software; there is no guarantee that there won't be any bugs in hardware/firmware - which could result in system failures. Such system failures are typically not easily distinguished as such.
There are a large number of viruses/security attacks etc. on Windows and much could be done by Microsoft to improve the situation. However, being held accountable for them in a court of law will be something that will not only kill Microsoft but also all Open Source Software. I mean, a recent while ago there was a story on Slashdot about a simple program running in user space could crash Linux Kernel. Will you consider that Linux Kernel a Lemon? I don't think so.
When it comes to Software and Internet, the current generation of laws simply do not apply or can be extended to apply. The lawmakers all around the world will sooner or later need to understand this and create new laws and mechanisms to enforce them.
Osho
If software had to live up to safety standards the same way physical products did, the authors of the software could be sued just like the makers of the physical products.
It already does! If I get caught by the FBI for downloads a product worth $199 MSRP, thats what I'll get charged for "stealing", even if no one lost any money or possesions. Thats a huge double standard. Copyright enfringment shouldn't have theft built in. The law is wrong.
The Better Business Bureau is a joke. They're not a pro-customer organization -- they're a *business* organization. Their job is to make complaints go away. Any complaint which isn't immediately quantifiable as directly lost money will be dismissed out of hand. And any complaint which does involve money, they'll try to resolve -- as the company's advocate, not yours.
Several years ago, I tracked down a spammer with a clearly fraudulent make-money-fast scam, and filed a complaint with the BBB. They didn't accept it as valid, and the company continued to show a completely clean record.
You can't sue the car company because someone else dented your car or poured sugar in your gas tank. For all intents and purposes windows works, it's just third party interference that becomes a problem.
NJ Local Music Scene
Viruses which actively cloak their own signatures are quite old.
Virus toolkits used by kiddies might be considered as self-replicating (and it's arguable whether the users of these have higher IQ than the resultant code ;-))
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
With little hesetation, even though he's broke
And i'm in the music business, and i think that's wrong!
Tibbon
tibbon.com
The possessive of "it" is "its", not "it's".
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
...because people do not UNDERSTAND software. To them, software (and computers!) are these ephemeral concepts that they will simply Never Grok, just like the average human being will Never Grok quantum physics, or third-year Calculus, or brain surgery. Ah, but cars, they understand. Cars, they feel comfortable with. Joe Average is not afraid of cars; he IS afraid of computers. To him, software is like this mysterious gift passed down from the Gods-- a gift which he does not even PARTIALLY understand, much less fully. All he knows is "I clicks duh button, an' it does somefing."
Because of this ignorance (note-- not stupidity but IGNORANCE, detestable only because in so many cases it is a willful ignorance), software companies can bend Joe Beer over and fuck him repeatedly-- since he won't even know he's been fucked. Heck, in this case, he doesn't even know what fucking is, or that software can fuck you. (OK, I'm getting silly now, but you get my point.)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Slippery slope me arse! Windows all along said that their source was a 'valuable secret' and refused to let you even try to 'discover' it. Linux is open and always has been. If you can get to a program, then you can modify it. Good man..it is your DUTY to modify it to your needs within the GNU of course! With windows you are locked out, so at least on the basis of that Window$$$$ should be held liable as they prevented any sight nor maintainance of a program known to be vulnerable to virii.
In the UK (no doubt other countries to) we have certain statutory rights regarding our purchases.
If a product is found to be "not of merchantable quality" we can get a refund. But as far as I know, unless using the product as intended causes injury or death, or other specific arrangements are in place, there is no comeback other than a full refund of the price paid, or a replacement item.
The issue with the EULA is that other arrangements might be in place, the kind that limit our rights to gain compensation possibly? I dont really know, they are too long an convuluted to be worth the agravation of decoding into plain english.
It may be that the only choice we have is to *not buy* Microsoft. After all, if the product doesn't work, why buy it?
"But we often have no alternative" I hear you say. And while that may be true, it will only show that while Microsoft products may be full of holes, no one else has done better - or we would have bought that instead.
I guess the real problem is that Microsoft really does hold the strong market position, and we just can't fight it hard enough.
From my point of view, I have no particular loyalty to Microsoft, except that virtually *all* of the software I need for my job has been released only for Windows or Mac OS. I don't have a Mac so I have to have Windows to do my job.
Why I can't get the software I need for Linux is pretty obvious (and here is where Open Source really is doing microsoft a favour), the Software companies are protected by the fact that Windows is closed source. If they start releasing their goods to linux, how long before all their code is ripped off in the name of GPL and Open Source, because they happened to need a GPL library to make their stuff work? Not my idea of a good business move. It also may not be a good business move for those companies, as Linux Desktop users probably still don't represent a large enough market to be worth investment in porting the software.
Role on the day when I can get all the software I need on Linux.
The case was ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg 86 F.3d 1447 (1996). It held that a license agreement, even inside a box of software, or even in a file on the media, will consumers who use the software after an opportunity to read the terms, unless the terms of the agreement are objectionable on grounds applicable to contracts in general.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
What I meant to say was that the license agreement will BIND consumers....
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
We just installed a new Windows Server 2003 domain and Exchange 2003 server for our company. As we were testing in the lab, we started looking at Microsoft's recommendations for running Exchange 2003 in your business. According to what we read, it takes a recommended 4 servers to implemement the first Exchange server. This is based on the recommended roles placement on domain controllers and member servers. ...Domain controllers, Schema master, Infrastructure master, Global Catalog servers, etc....
Is this designed out of systematic logic or profitability logic?
I am putting together a grid that shows an estimated cost of deploying the following to a 25 user business based on Microsoft's recommendations for implementation:
1. Windows 2003 server domain
2. E-mail server
3. SQL server
4. Desktops with applicable software
5. Firewall - ISA
6. Great Plains accounting package
7. Hardware based on MS recommendations
8. CALs
Can a business really afford this? My opinion is nope.