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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?"
if you get it for no price, you don't enjoy such priviledges.
If someone sells GPL based software, they are free to do so and pick up the tab on flaws in the product. Same goes for proprietary software.
This should have been done at least 10 years ago.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
If software controlling an aircraft crashes and causes the aircraft to crash too and that kills people, I'm pretty sure the software makers might end up liable too.
Actually it would probably be whoever decided that that software was OK to use in an aircraft. If I were to somehow get an aircraft and install Gentoo on some critical system, I'm pretty sure I'd be the one to get in trouble rather than the Gentoo or Linux (kernel) or Glibc people.
Well, as somebody with an engineering degree, I know that we were taught that we were responsible for designs produced using software products. So, for example, if one used structural design software to design a building, and that software gave erroneous results, you are to blame, and not the software.
I make software that goes on an aircraft for a living.
All such software is required to be certified by the FAA, which has elaborate requirements for development, documentation, and testing (the applicable document is DO-178B).
I'm told that the reason for certification is not safety, but culpability. If your software satisfies the requirements and passes review by the FAA, then your company will not be held liable if it causes problems.
In essence, certification represents "best effort" engineering practices and tries very hard to eliminate bugs in the final product.
By the time a software package gets on a plane, many people have combed over it looking for problems, and the testers have spent a massive amount of time running it. There is a safety/failure hazard analysis which asks all the "what if" questions, and the flight crew has written procedures in case it fails.
If a bug is found after deployment (this happens occasionally) and it is discovered that there was a flaw in the certification process, all hell would break loose. It would open up the FAA and the company to all sorts of lawsuits from injured parties. The people who signed off on the certification would essentially be screwed.
The FAA is generally a bunch of bureaucrats. The one thing they do well is look out for their own interests.
Oh, and I worked for the company that got Microsoft Windows certified to run in the cockpit as a map display. It's Posix compliant, dontcha' know!