Daemon's Advocate article

[Brooks Davis]

On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 05:42:31PM +0000, Hiten Pandya wrote:
> 	Although, one thing I know that makes Open Source software a
> 	little hard to accept at first is the usual clause of:
> 	``the author/insititute is not responsible for any possible
> 	damage caused by the software.''  With those kind of clauses
> 	it is sort of harder to push such software in companies where
> 	you would think the author would at the least answer questions
> 	about the software thoroughly.

While this is a a popular excuse for not adopting open source software,
it is mostly just an excuse.  The standard EULA not only excludes all
damages, but also declaims all warranties including that their packaging
or advertising bears any relation to the truth what so ever.  If the
standard EULA were actually enforceable as written, there would be
nothing you could do if there shipped you an empty envelope with the
license printed on it once you opened the envelope.

They only licenses I can recall off the top of my head that don't
completely disclaim all liability are the Intuit Turbo Tax license
which (IIRC, it's been a couple years since I actually read it) accepts
liability from math errors on their part and the Perforce license which
warrants, among other things, that the product actually does what the
manual says it does.

-- Brooks

-- 
Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
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