Linux admits...

...it's not fit for purpose shocker!

We already knew MS wasn't.

filthy microsoft

i want the law to go through and back date it to xp's release, get this sham mickey mouse software corp. giant busted once and for all. if i had bought a piece of hardware with the problems of mickeysoft have had that company would be bust by now. i want minimum wage recompense for every hour wasted trying to delouse my computer from its ineffective browser security . the man and company is a joke.

US lawyers *are* the lowest form of life

So Zemlin says "implied warranties that could result in a tremendous amount of unnecessary litigation" and he wonders why an organization that seems to represent the legal profession would be in favour of increased trade for their members? Go figure ...

Seriously though, what the heck do they mean by a 'material defect'? If they mean bugs, then to expect software to meet this is like expecting no punctuation, grammar or spelling errors in a novel, or expect a painting to be of photographic quality.

Haven't they (the US legal community) got enough mansions, gold-plated Hummer's, etc on the backs of IP trolling without starting a new venture? A zero defect clause would benefit no-one because it's just not realistic - certainly not without a lifetime of testing. No significant piece of software, bridge, ship, plane, automobile can be 100.0% free from defects - they have to be 'good enough' or the makers have to have taken 'reasonable care' to eliminate defects, (the level of 'reasonable care' obviously being a lot more for a nuclear power station than a toaster oven). That's good enough for me.

@"Linux admits..." (AC 11:59). Sorry, I don't see where either organisation said anything about the quality (or otherwise) of their current offerings. Grow up and go back to using iPaint on your Mac (not that I personally have any beef with Macista's).

(Flame icon because I usually get irate when I see most stories involving either the US legal or patent systems.)

Not a problem....

...we already know that high-assurance software can be had on the market for specialized tasks on specialized hardware (but may still exhibit 'bugs' or 'working as designed' flaws during their operational lifetime). Contracts for that kind of software do not start below several million dollars _per customer_ and insurance companies / the lawyer sweat tanks demand a cut. Wanna pay out of your spare personal income? Be my guest.

>> Would we accept those sort of terms and conditions for our cars, airplane, and critical medical equipment.

Because people own critical medical equipment and airplanes. Cars are high-volume but I hear the software in there is like sausage and currently moving in the wrong engineering direction of complexification and microsoftation.

Re:Buy this, it doesn't work!!!!

***"The software companies are saying “our product may not work correctly – tough shit”. Would we accept those sort of terms and conditions for our cars, airplane, and critical medical equipment."****

What do you want? Cheap (or even free) software with the "tough shit" clause, of *feckin* hugely expensive software without it. Your choice.

Get-out clause

Even if a requirement for a guarantee is introduced, I can see a massive get-out clause for Linux.

Free Software supplied in Source Code form should be treated like flat-pack furniture. The parts are guaranteed to fit together, is all. What you do with the article once you've built it is beyond the remit of the supplier. It's entirely up to *you* to verify its suitability for a particular purpose -- which might require you to engage an expert to assist you.

The Source Code allows you to go up to any programmer who knows the language in which it is written and say, "Will this program do what I want?" And if the answer turns out to be no, then the Source Code also allows any programmer who knows the language to *make* the program do what you want.

To all intents and purposes, the Source Code *is* the guarantee.

This is a good proposition

At last, it will OBLIGUE ANYBODY wanting to release a 'finished' product to be RESPONSIBLE of it.

Of course, open source will be allways able to release 'beta source code' so anybody will be able to compile for themselves, and share the blame.

But closed source or binary form releases will have to be PERFECT. ZERO BUGS.

It is past time that software gets the same quality level mandatory for other fields of engineering. Welcome to _defensive_ programing, where the programmer has to spend the time to be SURE that has all exceptions covered -> more time working-> more income.

Of course it will increase cost of software, so what? It will also mean that there are more people involved in it, and will stop this nosense spiral of upgrade.

All in all, i only see benefits for all parts involved.

Of course I may be wrong, but i don't think so.

@filthy microsoft

Wimp - I want it to go back to DOS 6 - that's when they stole Stac's disk compression, screwed it up and lost my data.

Bastards.

Information comes with no warranty

I like the way Dan Bernstein phrases it on his djbdns page: "Like any other piece of software (and information generally), djbdns comes with NO WARRANTY."

Of course, this should only hold for open-source software, where you, and anyone else, can read the information. Closed-source software, being unreadable for humans, should come with full warranty and responsibility for the distributor.

Could be a good idea

so long as you can make sure when it's self-certified "definitely fit for purpose". So most IT people wouldn't roll out Windows 7 until it was certified as being perfect, at which point it'd fail spectactularly and MS would die under metric tonnes of litigation. Some could be passed off to the people who write the device drivers, but most of the crap would accumulate in Redmond.

Linux, however, can sail along with self-certified kernels that really do work perfectly, checked in great detail. Then the distros can wrap whatever crap they want around it, safe in the knowledge that they've got a stable, secure, reliable base.

Of course, you'd not certify software as "fit for purpose" until you actually knew it was.

So you still need more lawyers to sort out all the paperwork, but at least it'd favour an Open Source model- and as it'd not be compulsary no-one could really moan about it stifling innovation.

@Jonathan...

Material defects as in the software doesn't perform as expected.

The lawyers are trying to write into law something that isn't feasible. If it does make it in to law, you can bet that there will definitely be a rapid decline in innovation and software/hardware releases. (Your hardware has embedded software in it.)

There's a pretty serious ripple effect.

First there will have to be some sort of professional licensing or criteria that all developers must have at a minimum. (Like an engineering degree from an accredited 4 year university )

Codified Best/Acceptable Practices that all developers must follow and it must be documented in case of litigation.

Probably a de-evolution back to Waterfall development methodology. You want to have a defined set requirements document with no or minimal scope creep. Sorry but Agile development would potentially introduce too much risk and a greater chance of litigation.

You can also bet your bottom dollar that offshoring will suddenly drop due to the potential litigation.

While the lawyers will attempt to make out like bandits, the real winners are those who design software development tools.

I quite agree with their stance ...

If everyone who wrote software had to guarantee it to be free from material defect there would be no IT industry at all. It would fairly stifle any will to develop software of any kind.

Of course, in ye olde days of lore, software _was_ guaranteed and fit for purpose because it went from a highly detailed spec or algorithm from a certified Systems Analyst to a lowly programmer who knew one language extremely well (say, COBOL -- it was actually a legal requirement in some industries, or some variant of Assembler) who's humble task was merely to actually implement said spec or algorithm with NO DEVIATION (how he did it was not really important) and NO SELF-OPINION or free interpretation of his own. There was no OS war, no "my programming language is better than yours" or you would simply be fired.

Said software was delivered on time and in budget and did what it did, usually very little when all said, extremely well. It very often still is, 30-40 years later. It was the basis on which the mainframe epoch was built.

Failure To Communicate

Software developers are taking potshots from people demanding they hit a bullseye on a moving target. Hardware continues to follow moore's law and my old saw of not adopting new software until the underlying hardware has been on the shelves at least 18 months is in need of revision as personal computing software struggles with multicores while the world moves onto netbooks with their heads in the clouds. The job of software developers has become apparent as everyone wants to be a rock star starring in a movie about their life. People want to be able to upload a hollywood version of their sad lives onto youtube, or some such place, and, do it all with a few clicks of a mouse. The hardware is on a pace to provide the means for such a worldwide circle jerk but writing the software is proving to be a bit of a bitch.

A satisfactory solution might see an explosion of geek maintenance companies dedicated to tweaking individual's personal computing devices on a daily, or, at least weekly basis. The software developers have to stop bullshitting the public with exaggerated claims echoing up from their mom's basements about how they finally done it all. Until then personal computing on all platforms remains, quite happily in my case, in the hands of those capable and willing to log the long hours enabling maximum performance from their many, varied toys.

PH because she is the archetypal, brain dead, tech zombie, "I don't deserve to be famous, but I need to be and will do anything necessary to be famous", too fucking stupid to own a computer, tech consumer.

Why should we make our software work?

All the people here who are bleating that making software companies responsible for making their products work would kill the software industry are just plain wrong.

It is not impossible to write good quality software. It is just that at the moment most software companies don't seem to put quality very high up the list of product requirements. If they can save a few bucks on their development costs that is seen as being better than applying a little more thought doing it right first time.

I'm sure if you have talked to people in the car industry in the seventies and said "you shouldn't be allowed to sell cars that rust to pieces within seconds of leaving the showroom (if they even lasted that long)" they would have told you that making such a requirement would kill off the whole of the car industry. Then the people did start to make cars that lasted, the others were forced to compete or die. The problem in the software industry is there is not enough competition, and the virtual monopoly products aren't of saleable quality. Given a choice between broken products and working ones customers would vote with their wallets. The software industry would get off its collective lazy ass and start writing something decent. Perhaps if they did they would learn that they'd save a very large fortune in the support costs and that all the programmers currently employed in fixing the junk the original development team through together could then be re-deployed in writing new software they could sell.

@AC

"Developers should just write good quality software that works"

So who's fault is it if the OS vendor changes a system library that an application depends on (perhaps because a security flaw is found) and the application *subsequently* stops working??

"The problem in the software industry is there is not enough competition"

How exactly will imposing strict liability and warranty for software help?? The more regulation there is, the more barriers to entry there are for small independent software vendors to break into a market. It will only be the large monopolies who'll be able to afford the teams of lawyers and testers necessary to release anything!

Even simpler:

The software works as designed. It's -designed- to behave that way when your hardware appears to be in that state. Maybe you should look into why your RAM contained data that looked like an exception, or why your video card stopped responding...

Or for the entire OS/device driver issues, where it is common for a device driver to use undocumented, unsupported features (spoken "Bugs"). When the features are removed/fixed in a later SP, the device driver no longer works. Who do you blame for that? The person who wrote the driver that worked until you changed the underlying architecture, or the person who -fixed- the memory leak in the underlying architecture? For that matter, once you and your lawyer have looked into the problem enough to prove who is to blame, you can just fix it.

Flames for to burn the evil empire of lawyers.

Re:Why should we make our software work?

***"All the people here who are bleating that making software companies responsible for making their products work would kill the software industry are just plain wrong."***

Nope, it won't 'kill' the software industry. It will just make software development a much longer and, therefore, more expensive process. And that cost will be passed on to the customer.

So how much are you willing to pay for your software to ensure its defect free?

Thought so.

Software wants to be treated like medicine

You know that doctors only ever "practice" medicine

There are no guarantees with medicine. There are a lot of ambulance chasers in the 'States but it has to be an egregious case to actually collect on the malpractice insurance. (Otherwise the insurance companies wouldn't offer any.)

The software developers can never claim to do more than practice their trade because there are certain standards that the practitioner of these dark arts would be held to otherwise.

That would require examinations, board certifications, best practices, standards and years of training before they would let anyone loose on a keyboard. Since its not rocket science, the developers have gotten away with that kind of substandard, amateurish crap-fest and cluster-f*ck

BTW. if airplane pilots were held to the same standards, there could/should/would be no commercial aviation and nobody would even get onto an elevator because they couldn't/shouldn't/wouldn't trust that the architects to know enough to line up the holes from one floor to the next.

Only in America

In the democratic world (outside of America) , if this became law, it would not have any effect.

Things like Linux and in particular , Ubuntu are beyond the reach of American law.

Such a law would only help to generate software in Europe and Asia, while America stagnated.

Would put America even deeper into an economic meltdown.

To avoid the consequences of the law in America, you would have revert to something simple like DOS.

Good luck to you.

Now ...

It occurs to me that even if I could write totally bug-free (from my perspective) software, what's the guarantee that when it is compiled, the compiler and various dependencies are similarly 100% bug free?

They wouldn't be. So even if your end of the equation was guaranteed bug-free the final distributed binaries could never be.

The only alternative would be to first create your own bug-free compiler (good luck with that because a lot of compilers ONLY WORK by exploiting hardware bugs and tricks) and libraries BEFORE writing any actual saleable software.

Oh, and speaking of which, the microprocessor's own microcode is unlikely to be 100% bug free either.