Re: Castles and Security (fwd)

[Darren Reed <darrenr () reed wattle id au>]

In some email I received from Antonomasia, sie wrote:
[...]
> > If I build a house and select quality bricks, and find that after the house
> > was built the bricks were made of baked sand in stead of a concrete mixture
> > (as advertised) as to allow anyone to enter in to my house, I could have
> > legal recourse.
[...]
> > Furthermore, and this is where the open source community will benefit in the
> > long term, that components can be analyzed and fixed, whilst products from
> > the non-open source garage must be fixed by the vendor.
>
> And open-source suppliers will be exempt from the legal recourse you want ?
> Or prompt fixes will win immunity ?

FWIW, in my naievity, I suggested to some local fellows a while ago that we
try and deliver software that actually came with some sort of gaurantee...
the problem with that (as it was explained tome) is you're liabel for any
failure of that software - EVEN IF IT ISN'T YOUR FAULT, i.e. because of bad
RAM.  So all those disclaimers you get with commercial software are in fact
required and hence let software authors get away with producing buggy software
that they don't have to fix.

Support contracts which promise 24x7 coverage (and someone on your doorstop
at 4:26am) are about the best you can do.

Darren

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