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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?"
As a developer, I say that surely it's the tester's fault if there's flaws!
Go home and shave your giant head of smell with your bad self
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
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.
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.
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
A good analogy is like a map that lets you see a wider view of the terrain. A bad analogy is like the wrong sort of petrol in your car.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I know a joke based on this:
If food makers used the same licenses as software makers, then in a opaque box, there would be a license agreement:
1. The manufacturer does not guarantee that this item can be used for food and is not liable if it is not suitable for eating.
2. The user is not allowed to examine the contents of this item (for example to look if it had rat tails in it).
3. The user has a right to use (eat) the product, but does not become its owner.
4. The right to use (eat) the product gets only one person.
5. The user does not have a right to sell of give away the product to third parties.
6. The manufacturer does not guarantee that the product is free of hazardous materials (for example, rat poison, dioxin etc).
7. The manufacturer is not liable for any health risk to the user because of the product.
8. The manufacturer guarantees that the box is made of high quality materials and, if there is a flaw in it, will replace the box. This does not extend to the product that is in the box.
9. By opening the box and reading this agreement the user automatically agrees to it.
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!
> I'm looking at a silica packet that is labled, "Do not eat."
I followed those instructions and nearly starved to death!
My lawyer advised suing for "negligence causing anorexia."
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."