[H-GEN] Good news for us unix-heads

[Greg Black]

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Raymond Smith wrote:

| On Fri, 18 Jan 2002, Anthony Towns wrote:
| > It'll also be interesting to see if they can get away with claiming to
| > be `delivering on Trustworthy Computing', while retaining statements
| > like `MICROSOFT HEREBY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS WITH
| > REGARD TO THE SOFTWARE, INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES AND
| > CONDITIONS OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE'. If
| > you're not even confident enough to say "We think this product is
| > actually reasonably fit for its ordinary purpose", why should *anyone*
| > trust your product?
| 
| Can our community really claim to be different? Even the GPL includes
| clauses like this. I think people could come to 'trust' Microsoft software
| for the same reasons that they 'trust' the Apache Software Foundation:
| because they produce a good product with demonstrable reliability.
| 
| Certainly there are other factors. For us, we can trust Apache more than
| IIS because we have the source and can see how it works. But when it comes
| down to Joe Average Businessman all it takes is for the product to work
| first time, every time and he will be happy. Especially when there is
| already an established culture of software manufactures being
| unaccountable for the crud they produce.

And let's not forget that the Usanians now have that terrible
legal framework that almost makes it a crime to talk about bugs
you find in proprietary software -- hardly a culture where real
responsibility by vendors is going to be encouraged.

Greg

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