Too bad lawyers don't donate their time and expertise like OS programmers do!
Actually, they do. It's called working pro-bono and it seems to be something that most lawyers do at least some of the time. In fact, it might even be the case that a larger fraction of lawyers have worked pro bono at some point in their life than OS programmers!
If all the authors agree, they can issue new licenses to people under different terms. But unless the original license has a unilateral termination clause, the original licensees can continue to abide by the terms of the original license on the original code.
Thankfully, the FSF and other people have been mostly successful in discouraging Free Software with unilateral license termination clauses.
The original article says: A sensible document retention policy is the next step. Destroying older data - really destroying it, not just deleting the files - will prevent it from being discovered. Log files should also be purged on a regular basis. While they don't include the contents of messages, they can be used to establish that communication occurred.
This might cover tracks that could potentially be problematic during a lawsuit, but it certainly destroys information that would be useful for future generations of historians and researchers. I seem to remember that most of what we know about the past comes from seemingly trivial records like trade accounts, financial records, personal correspondance, and garbage dumps.
I think it is irresponsible to suggest that out of a fear of lawsuits today, we should rob the future generations of an opportunity to learn about their own history. Especially in the technological sector which is building the infrastructure for tomorrow. Perhaps there should be some sort of legal protection for an "Information Archive" site that keeps sealed documents in confidence for 50 years but then releases the contents into the historical record.
I am not a lawyer, but from what I remember, the origin of Limited Liability Corporations is not to prevent criminal prosecutions. As far as I know, it was to shield investors from the claims of creditors demanding payment. The debts are held by the corporation, not the individual investors. This is the main difference between partnerships and corporations. It serves a social purpose by allowing people to participate in financially risky endevours without risking everything they have. The creditors know this and are supposed to factor it into their original decision to give the loan.
It is totally reasonable to send an individual to prison if he/she uses a corporation to commit a criminal act (like intimidating someone else or causing injury). It is disturbing to think that someone could enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution just by saying "it wasn't me, it was the corporation." Whether the criminal act was in the corporate interest seems irrelevant.
Hmmm... If it is possible to do this with only commercial broadcasts, does it mean that this technology might be within the reach of hobbyists?
Anyone know if this requires extremely sensitive and expensive antennas? Or is the hard problem really one of extracting the "signal" from the noise. It seems to be the latter on the face of it. The idea seems to be to study the patterns in what would ordinarily be considered noise to localize atmospheric disturbances.
Could we really have a GNUAircraftTracker running a-la SETI@Home?
I'm surprised that so many people have asserted that forcing the revelation of a document's contents is taking somebody's property. The government does this all the time without any compensation. A whole host of court records are public, as are a whole bunch of other things.
Anyone remember the recent impeachment trial? The government revealed the contents of the Linda Tripp Tapes without any compensation to either Linda Tripp or Monica Lewinsky. That was not a criminal matter. The two ladies certainly held the copyright to those tapes and we all know that many a tabloid T.V. show would have paid big bucks for the exclusive right to air those tapes. So, that copyright certainly was worth money. But it isn't property by any stretch of the imagination and so it doesn't fall under the constitutional prohibition against taking property without compensation.
We all should remember not to use misleading phrases like "intellectual property."
A useful statement of Occam's razor: "When you have two competing theories which make exactly the same predictions, the one that is simpler is the better."
As for me, I find that in this context, it useful to remember Occam's Razor in a more literal fashion:
Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate or "plurality should not be posited without necessity."
Or alternatively:
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem or "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"
The second seems particularly apt: can anyone say, "Code fork?";-)
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned this yet. The NSA is reportedly one of the biggest employers of mathematicians in the world. They have had decades of time to develop their own theories as well as learn from all the work going on in the open. We can only imagine the kind of mathematical wonderland the NSA must have built up by now!
I hope at some point their theorems start being declassified. It would be fascinating to know how many things were done first by the NSA (Public Key Cryptography is rumored to be one such thing) and how many others have no parallels in the outside world. Given the nature of its general mission, I'm sure that the NSA has an interest in Computer Science and Complexity Theory. For all we know, the NSA could be sitting on a proof that "P != NP" and none of us would know any better!
Tactically, it might be better to wait a little while and let IBM start marketing their products in a big way as "Redhat Linux Compatible." Once their campaign has momentum, our (The GNU/Linux community) hand is considerably strengthened. That is the point at which it makes sense to start making a fuss about the "misleading advertising," or better yet, claiming that their product is buggy since the modem doesn't work. At that point, IBM has only two real choices:
Declare that they lied and it wasn't compatible after all
Work valiantly to make their modem work with Linux
Notice that option 1 becomes less and less viable the longer IBM has been claiming "Redhat Linux compatibility." At the moment, they could withdraw that assertion without anybody (including the mainstream media) noticing. So, an appropriately delayed response will probably get us option 2. In fact, if at that point IBM feels pressured to get things done fast, they might even feel a greater pressure to work with existing developers to quickly release GPLed drivers as opposed to binary-only ones.
It is certainly worth your while to visit the schools you are interested in and to walk down the corridors and talk to the graduate students. Step inside the labs and ask them to show you what they are working on.
Students will generally tell you both the good and bad things about a place. Be sure to ask them (off the record) about the professors and their personalities. Graduate school isn't about reading books/papers and hacking solo. It is about participating in an academic community and getting to see how experienced people think about new and interesting problems.
Finally, don't worry about the money. $16K per year is more than enough to pay rent, eat good food, make yearly IRA contributions, take a couple of plane trips every year, and even go out every now and then. Just try to avoid the money sink known as an automobile and you'll be fine.
Sorry if my original post wasn't as clear as it could have been. I was merely pointing out that while I certainly believe in Universal Human Rights (which includes such things as respect for diversity and dissent), the government of China doesn't necessarily agree with me. The reason that they can politically afford to do so is that they can suppress dissent brutally and get away with it due to the relatively monocultural nature of their society (due to powerful historical forces).
Heck, it's absolutely WRONG for a country to oppress its own citizenry in such a manner, but there is little we can do about it without overt or covert conflict. There is a real and deep disagreement, which we would do well to recognize and not paper over with talk of "constructive engagement." But moral indignation alone won't make anything better.
I'm not saying that any group of political elites is necessarily more kind-hearted than the other. We have our fair share of skeletons in our closets. Just that in diverse societies today, all but the most ruthless of politicians have to accept some degree of diversity as a fact of life.
Massive multicultural democracies like the United States, India, Canada, and possibly eventually the European-Union are completely different from immense monocultural countries like China and Japan. Multicultural democracies have to tolerate dissent and even some weird fringe groups because any attempt to crack down on them would likely lead to a civil war at some point. Some do a better job of it than others, but to a degree, it is a prerequisite for survival. Accepting differences is just a matter of acknowledging a reality one could do little about.
In contrast, China has only one time zone for a country with the east-west expansiveness of the continental United States. China could eliminate all non-Han people (through intermarriage, reeducation, or simple killing) and still carry on as though nothing had happened. In fact, I don't think that anybody in the ruling leadership of China would mind! Its identity is very different and monolithic which explains the extreme vehemence with which the PRC goes against anything perceived as being "splittist." It has had one shared written language for centuries. It isn't going to let a bunch of punks, crazy or otherwise, stand in the way of its "glorious unity." When those 10,000 people demonstrated peacefully, they knew what they were inviting upon themselves.
While I personally believe that the future belongs to diversity and multicultural cooperation, I also see that the Chinese don't necessarily agree. As long as they stay in their corner and don't mess with any of us, it doesn't have to get ugly. But one of these days, it will. Think about it, with Tibet (the traditional religious buffer state that nobody in the past would have bothered to invade. Who wants to beat up on a bunch of monks?) under Chinese millitary occupation, China and India now share a border and one is monolithic and the other multicultural. Right now, both are millitarily weak with India much more so, so conflict there is not on the horizon... yet.
Thankfully, the USA does not share a border with China. But that does not mean that conflict is not coming. The Chinese are just trying to delay that as much as possible, while like it or not, the USA is covertly trying its best to hasten that day's arrival by doing what it can to support "splittism" in China without seeming overt about it. I doubt it is coincidental that Falgun-Gong is based in the USA.
There is another cost that usually gets ignored: Billing Costs. These are in two parts. The first is a non-monetary one for the customer who must figure out how much to pay for a given piece of mail and then must make the payment. The second is the cost of the postal service to accept payment and make sure that there are not too many "free riders."
The nice thing about the current system of flat-rate billing for practically all 1st class letters, and only a weight-related one beyond that, is its ease of use for the customer who buys bunches of stamps and has to do practically no thinking at all. It also retains the ability to be relatively anonymous and untraceable. It is also very easy for the post-office to make sure that letters have been paid for.
A more complicated billing system would be possible to implement, but the costs involved in running it might overwhelm any advantages of efficiency that it might provide. Of course, an honor-system based payment scheme might work, but it might make people suspect that there are lots of "free riders" out there, even if they really aren't. Besides, it would impose a large (and hidden!) cost on the citizenry which would have to figure out and use the new system.
P.S. I don't think that personal letters are subsidizing junk mail. It is probably the other way around since their volume averages out fixed costs for distribution and thus makes the personal letters cheaper to send and receive.
I fully agree that there is an important place for anonymity on the Internet. But there is a difference between claiming to be "Publius" or "Anonymous Coward #1234" and claiming to be "Linus Torvalds."
A law against falsification of identity in electronic correspondance should be against claiming to be someone you are not, rather than against obvious anonymity. It would be easy (and uncontrovercial) to require anonymous messages to be explicitly and conspicuously marked as being anonymous (like using usernames like "Anon1234" or "Anonymous Coward").
> Boston and Cambridge are in the longest period > of economic growth they've ever had, and that > growth would have been stillborn (or at least > stunted) if rent control were still in effect > today, IT industry or not. There's a spiffy new > Star Market near Central Square, with one of > the biggest ethnic foods section I've ever seen. > No way in hell that would have been built ten > years ago.
There is more going on in the Greater-Boston area than meets the eye. Remember, MIT and Harvard, through their endowments and various shadowy shell companies, own VAST amounts of property in this area. The Star Market in University Park was put there by MIT --- as a part of its overall plan to gentrify Central Square and prepare the area for the next century of MIT's growth. I'm not kidding here, MIT has development plans with timescales of decades...
Remember, MIT and Harvard have multi-billion dollar endowments, get further billions in government (taxpayer) funding, and each recieves hundreds of millions each year in alumni contributions. They consciously create new technologies and spin-off companies. If anyone thinks this is just the "free market" and "profit motive" at work, then they are quite naive.
Does anyone know the economics on constructing modern highrise buildings for a place like Silicon Valley? If the costs of earthquake-proofed tall buildings are not prohibitive, it sure seems that it would be worth it to rezone places to allow highrises with hundreds of apartments/condos, gigabit ethernet connections in every room, with startup-incubators, meeting rooms, etc. for the entrepreneurially inclined in the same building.
Although the idea of having a government enforced billing meter running on every email server is crazy (the technology is changing too fast. Will ICQ messages count? IRC? etc.), the general idea of having people who use the technology help subsidise the have-nots in our world might not be a bad idea.
There is no reason we could not have an Honor System method that would entail responsible or concerned organizations making contributions based on estimated net-usage and then configuring their sendmails to add a little: X-I-Support-A-Public-Net: YES [insert amount of support here] to their messages.
Then, a law could be made to forbid falsifying email headers (which needs to be done to help crack down on SPAMMERS anyway) which would also include forging this message when they did not actually support it.
This way, public and possibly socially conscious stockholder pressure (along with some well publicized filters for popular email programs) might just help raise a lot of money by making it uncool and possibly unprofitable to be a pure commercial leech on the 'net --- which was, after all, designed and built due to the support of US Taxpayers.
Comparing "software" to another specific field like "Civil Engineering" is misleading. It is too broad of a category. However, that being said, it seems to me that in the age of cheap disk space and fast pipes, the following basic ideas should be workable in some form:
If the source code and accompanying documents or tools needed to work on the program are available, then an explicit disclaimer of liability is permissible since the user community can be reasonably expected to be able to fix and identify any issues themselves. Of course, for this condition to hold, users must not be restricted from sharing information with each other.
For anything which does not come with the source code and other documents needed to build the thing from scratch, liability falls directly on the distributor unless someone else explicitly takes it on.
Corporations can explicitly accept liability for the products they produce, if they can post a bond or demonstrate sufficient insurance to do so.
Individuals can explicitly accept liability for the products that they produce or manage. They must do this on a per-finished-product basis and can't simply be forced to accept it in advance as a part of an employment contract.
Anyone accepting liability can specify specific limits on what functional domains they are willing to accept liability for. However, whatever remains will flow to everybody else listed above.
The developers/managers/testers of a product have the right to include comments with the product if they feel ethically responsible to do so. Disclosing true bugs is protected, and this right can not be contracted away by any means.
Example: If some corporation wants to release a proprietary product, anyone who distributes it (even gratis) would be liable unless the company explicitly takes on that liability itself. However, if the developers feel confident enough about their product to trust that users' will never need the source code, then they are free to explicitly sign off for portions of the product and thereby reduce the liability of the company. They can only sign off on things that they actually were somehow responsible for.
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Too bad lawyers don't donate their time and expertise like OS programmers do!
Actually, they do. It's called working pro-bono and it seems to be something that most lawyers do at least some of the time. In fact, it might even be the case that a larger fraction of lawyers have worked pro bono at some point in their life than OS programmers!
If all the authors agree, they can issue new licenses to people under different terms. But unless the original license has a unilateral termination clause, the original licensees can continue to abide by the terms of the original license on the original code.
Thankfully, the FSF and other people have been mostly successful in discouraging Free Software with unilateral license termination clauses.
The original article says:
A sensible document retention policy is the next step. Destroying older data - really destroying it, not just deleting the files - will prevent it from being discovered. Log files should also be purged on a regular basis. While they don't include the contents of messages, they can be used to establish that communication occurred.
This might cover tracks that could potentially be problematic during a lawsuit, but it certainly destroys information that would be useful for future generations of historians and researchers. I seem to remember that most of what we know about the past comes from seemingly trivial records like trade accounts, financial records, personal correspondance, and garbage dumps.
I think it is irresponsible to suggest that out of a fear of lawsuits today, we should rob the future generations of an opportunity to learn about their own history. Especially in the technological sector which is building the infrastructure for tomorrow. Perhaps there should be some sort of legal protection for an "Information Archive" site that keeps sealed documents in confidence for 50 years but then releases the contents into the historical record.
I am not a lawyer, but from what I remember, the origin of Limited Liability Corporations is not to prevent criminal prosecutions. As far as I know, it was to shield investors from the claims of creditors demanding payment. The debts are held by the corporation, not the individual investors. This is the main difference between partnerships and corporations. It serves a social purpose by allowing people to participate in financially risky endevours without risking everything they have. The creditors know this and are supposed to factor it into their original decision to give the loan.
It is totally reasonable to send an individual to prison if he/she uses a corporation to commit a criminal act (like intimidating someone else or causing injury). It is disturbing to think that someone could enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution just by saying "it wasn't me, it was the corporation." Whether the criminal act was in the corporate interest seems irrelevant.
Hmmm... If it is possible to do this with only commercial broadcasts, does it mean that this technology might be within the reach of hobbyists?
Anyone know if this requires extremely sensitive and expensive antennas? Or is the hard problem really one of extracting the "signal" from the noise. It seems to be the latter on the face of it. The idea seems to be to study the patterns in what would ordinarily be considered noise to localize atmospheric disturbances.
Could we really have a GNUAircraftTracker running a-la SETI@Home?
I'm surprised that so many people have asserted that forcing the revelation of a document's contents is taking somebody's property. The government does this all the time without any compensation. A whole host of court records are public, as are a whole bunch of other things.
Anyone remember the recent impeachment trial? The government revealed the contents of the Linda Tripp Tapes without any compensation to either Linda Tripp or Monica Lewinsky. That was not a criminal matter. The two ladies certainly held the copyright to those tapes and we all know that many a tabloid T.V. show would have paid big bucks for the exclusive right to air those tapes. So, that copyright certainly was worth money. But it isn't property by any stretch of the imagination and so it doesn't fall under the constitutional prohibition against taking property without compensation.
We all should remember not to use misleading phrases like "intellectual property."
"When you have two competing theories which make exactly the same predictions, the one that is simpler is the better."
As for me, I find that in this context, it useful to remember Occam's Razor in a more literal fashion:
Or alternatively: The second seems particularly apt: can anyone say, "Code fork?"I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned this yet. The NSA is reportedly one of the biggest employers of mathematicians in the world. They have had decades of time to develop their own theories as well as learn from all the work going on in the open. We can only imagine the kind of mathematical wonderland the NSA must have built up by now!
I hope at some point their theorems start being declassified. It would be fascinating to know how many things were done first by the NSA (Public Key Cryptography is rumored to be one such thing) and how many others have no parallels in the outside world. Given the nature of its general mission, I'm sure that the NSA has an interest in Computer Science and Complexity Theory. For all we know, the NSA could be sitting on a proof that "P != NP" and none of us would know any better!
- Declare that they lied and it wasn't compatible after all
- Work valiantly to make their modem work with Linux
Notice that option 1 becomes less and less viable the longer IBM has been claiming "Redhat Linux compatibility." At the moment, they could withdraw that assertion without anybody (including the mainstream media) noticing. So, an appropriately delayed response will probably get us option 2. In fact, if at that point IBM feels pressured to get things done fast, they might even feel a greater pressure to work with existing developers to quickly release GPLed drivers as opposed to binary-only ones.It seems like it is worth waiting to me...
It is certainly worth your while to visit the schools you are interested in and to walk down the corridors and talk to the graduate students. Step inside the labs and ask them to show you what they are working on.
Students will generally tell you both the good and bad things about a place. Be sure to ask them (off the record) about the professors and their personalities. Graduate school isn't about reading books/papers and hacking solo. It is about participating in an academic community and getting to see how experienced people think about new and interesting problems.
Finally, don't worry about the money. $16K per year is more than enough to pay rent, eat good food, make yearly IRA contributions, take a couple of plane trips every year, and even go out every now and then. Just try to avoid the money sink known as an automobile and you'll be fine.
Sorry if my original post wasn't as clear as it could have been. I was merely pointing out that while I certainly believe in Universal Human Rights (which includes such things as respect for diversity and dissent), the government of China doesn't necessarily agree with me. The reason that they can politically afford to do so is that they can suppress dissent brutally and get away with it due to the relatively monocultural nature of their society (due to powerful historical forces).
Heck, it's absolutely WRONG for a country to oppress its own citizenry in such a manner, but there is little we can do about it without overt or covert conflict. There is a real and deep disagreement, which we would do well to recognize and not paper over with talk of "constructive engagement." But moral indignation alone won't make anything better.
I'm not saying that any group of political elites is necessarily more kind-hearted than the other. We have our fair share of skeletons in our closets. Just that in diverse societies today, all but the most ruthless of politicians have to accept some degree of diversity as a fact of life.
Massive multicultural democracies like the United States, India, Canada, and possibly eventually the European-Union are completely different from immense monocultural countries like China and Japan. Multicultural democracies have to tolerate dissent and even some weird fringe groups because any attempt to crack down on them would likely lead to a civil war at some point. Some do a better job of it than others, but to a degree, it is a prerequisite for survival. Accepting differences is just a matter of acknowledging a reality one could do little about.
In contrast, China has only one time zone for a country with the east-west expansiveness of the continental United States. China could eliminate all non-Han people (through intermarriage, reeducation, or simple killing) and still carry on as though nothing had happened. In fact, I don't think that anybody in the ruling leadership of China would mind! Its identity is very different and monolithic which explains the extreme vehemence with which the PRC goes against anything perceived as being "splittist." It has had one shared written language for centuries. It isn't going to let a bunch of punks, crazy or otherwise, stand in the way of its "glorious unity." When those 10,000 people demonstrated peacefully, they knew what they were inviting upon themselves.
While I personally believe that the future belongs to diversity and multicultural cooperation, I also see that the Chinese don't necessarily agree. As long as they stay in their corner and don't mess with any of us, it doesn't have to get ugly. But one of these days, it will. Think about it, with Tibet (the traditional religious buffer state that nobody in the past would have bothered to invade. Who wants to beat up on a bunch of monks?) under Chinese millitary occupation, China and India now share a border and one is monolithic and the other multicultural. Right now, both are millitarily weak with India much more so, so conflict there is not on the horizon... yet.
Thankfully, the USA does not share a border with China. But that does not mean that conflict is not coming. The Chinese are just trying to delay that as much as possible, while like it or not, the USA is covertly trying its best to hasten that day's arrival by doing what it can to support "splittism" in China without seeming overt about it. I doubt it is coincidental that Falgun-Gong is based in the USA.
There is another cost that usually gets ignored: Billing Costs. These are in two parts. The first is a non-monetary one for the customer who must figure out how much to pay for a given piece of mail and then must make the payment. The second is the cost of the postal service to accept payment and make sure that there are not too many "free riders."
The nice thing about the current system of flat-rate billing for practically all 1st class letters, and only a weight-related one beyond that, is its ease of use for the customer who buys bunches of stamps and has to do practically no thinking at all. It also retains the ability to be relatively anonymous and untraceable. It is also very easy for the post-office to make sure that letters have been paid for.
A more complicated billing system would be possible to implement, but the costs involved in running it might overwhelm any advantages of efficiency that it might provide. Of course, an honor-system based payment scheme might work, but it might make people suspect that there are lots of "free riders" out there, even if they really aren't. Besides, it would impose a large (and hidden!) cost on the citizenry which would have to figure out and use the new system.
P.S. I don't think that personal letters are subsidizing junk mail. It is probably the other way around since their volume averages out fixed costs for distribution and thus makes the personal letters cheaper to send and receive.
I fully agree that there is an important place for anonymity on the Internet. But there is a difference between claiming to be "Publius" or "Anonymous Coward #1234" and claiming to be "Linus Torvalds."
A law against falsification of identity in electronic correspondance should be against claiming to be someone you are not, rather than against obvious anonymity. It would be easy (and uncontrovercial) to require anonymous messages to be explicitly and conspicuously marked as being anonymous (like using usernames like "Anon1234" or "Anonymous Coward").
That should satisfy most concerns.
> Boston and Cambridge are in the longest period
> of economic growth they've ever had, and that
> growth would have been stillborn (or at least
> stunted) if rent control were still in effect
> today, IT industry or not. There's a spiffy new
> Star Market near Central Square, with one of
> the biggest ethnic foods section I've ever seen.
> No way in hell that would have been built ten
> years ago.
There is more going on in the Greater-Boston area than meets the eye. Remember, MIT and Harvard, through their endowments and various shadowy shell companies, own VAST amounts of property in this area. The Star Market in University Park was put there by MIT --- as a part of its overall plan to gentrify Central Square and prepare the area for the next century of MIT's growth. I'm not kidding here, MIT has development plans with timescales of decades...
Remember, MIT and Harvard have multi-billion dollar endowments, get further billions in government (taxpayer) funding, and each recieves hundreds of millions each year in alumni contributions. They consciously create new technologies and spin-off companies. If anyone thinks this is just the "free market" and "profit motive" at work, then they are quite naive.
Does anyone know the economics on constructing modern highrise buildings for a place like Silicon Valley? If the costs of earthquake-proofed tall buildings are not prohibitive, it sure seems that it would be worth it to rezone places to allow highrises with hundreds of apartments/condos, gigabit ethernet connections in every room, with startup-incubators, meeting rooms, etc. for the entrepreneurially inclined in the same building.
What are the obstacles?
Although the idea of having a government enforced billing meter running on every email server is crazy (the technology is changing too fast. Will ICQ messages count? IRC? etc.), the general idea of having people who use the technology help subsidise the have-nots in our world might not be a bad idea.
There is no reason we could not have an Honor System method that would entail responsible or concerned organizations making contributions based on estimated net-usage and then configuring their sendmails to add a little:
X-I-Support-A-Public-Net: YES [insert amount of support here]
to their messages.
Then, a law could be made to forbid falsifying email headers (which needs to be done to help crack down on SPAMMERS anyway) which would also include forging this message when they did not actually support it.
This way, public and possibly socially conscious stockholder pressure (along with some well publicized filters for popular email programs) might just help raise a lot of money by making it uncool and possibly unprofitable to be a pure commercial leech on the 'net --- which was, after all, designed and built due to the support of US Taxpayers.
So, is this going to be available for GNU/Linux or not?
- If the source code and accompanying documents or tools needed to work on the program are available, then an explicit disclaimer of liability is permissible since the user community can be reasonably expected to be able to fix and identify any issues themselves. Of course, for this condition to hold, users must not be restricted from sharing information with each other.
- For anything which does not come with the source code and other documents needed to build the thing from scratch, liability falls directly on the distributor unless someone else explicitly takes it on.
- Corporations can explicitly accept liability for the products they produce, if they can post a bond or demonstrate sufficient insurance to do so.
- Individuals can explicitly accept liability for the products that they produce or manage. They must do this on a per-finished-product basis and can't simply be forced to accept it in advance as a part of an employment contract.
- Anyone accepting liability can specify specific limits on what functional domains they are willing to accept liability for. However, whatever remains will flow to everybody else listed above.
- The developers/managers/testers of a product have the right to include comments with the product if they feel ethically responsible to do so. Disclosing true bugs is protected, and this right can not be contracted away by any means.
Example: If some corporation wants to release a proprietary product, anyone who distributes it (even gratis) would be liable unless the company explicitly takes on that liability itself. However, if the developers feel confident enough about their product to trust that users' will never need the source code, then they are free to explicitly sign off for portions of the product and thereby reduce the liability of the company. They can only sign off on things that they actually were somehow responsible for.