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Should Developers Be Liable For Their Code?
Glyn Moody writes "They might be, if a new European Commission consumer protection proposal, which suggests 'licensing should guarantee consumers the same basic rights as when they purchase a good: the right to get a product that works with fair commercial conditions,' becomes law. The idea of making Microsoft pay for the billions of dollars of damage caused by flaws in its products is certainly attractive, but where would this idea leave free software coders?"
The idea that code should be perfect is a stupid idea: consumers don't want that.
They want "good enough," not perfect. Perfect costs a great deal of money, probably 4X, and consumers will buy the good enough product, at 1/4 of that price, well beyond 95% of the time.
C//
Say a developer uses a number of 3rd party libraries (ie. Boost, TinyXML, etc), who will be pay damages if the program crashes in a bad way? The developer for not trying to catch 3rd party crashes, or the 3rd party for writing in bad code?
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.
If the law changes and requires software to offer a warranty then the GPL will be vulnerable. Even if the GPL didn't include that statement, a court could invalidated it because a contract that breaks the law is not legally binding.
Changing a license for a big project isn't always easy.
This will most likely hurt companies like Redhat, Canonical, Novell and other corporate open source contributors because they will have to stand by their products and you're bound to get a few cases where they have to pay up.
But it's not a law yet.
Dual Opteron < $600
Do you really want to pay for perfect? There are risks associated with anything and buying perfect costs a hell of a lot of money.
This is an issue that is more complicated that should developers be held liable for perfection. Is it good enough to work reliably in most cases? Was there a malicious or negligent intent to box and bunch of schlock? There are a lot of good questions that could be asked here when trying to define the responsibility and accountability of development companies.
The market for proprietary software and the community for open source software does function pretty good for weeding out the crapware.
Don't think of it as a flame, more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage.
Hmm, it would probably go like this:
Engineers: "It's the software!"
Developers: "It's the hardware!"
Both: "Why didn't the testers catch this?"
Testers: "That wasn't one of the use cases, so it's the designers' fault."
Designers: "The product wasn't meant to be used that way, so it's a documentation error if the tech writers didn't tell users not to do that."
Tech writers: "Don't look at me, I just write what you guys tell me to write."
Open Source Developer: Don't look at me. My users contribute design ideas, code, docs, testing, etc. So if there's a problem, it's their fault 4 times over for designing it, coding it, failing to test it, and failing to document it. ;-)
Actually it'll probably work out like:
Providers: Yeah, it's broken, sorry. Contact our insurance company, and put in a claim.
Clients: Oh, you're insured for this? Great.
Providers: Yeah, of course. We're pros, and totally insured for this, like all the other pros. Why else do you think you couldn't get a two-page website for less than $12,000?