Software liability
Posted Jun 11, 2002 23:35 UTC (Tue) by
giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
Parent article:
Software liability
So you would eliminate a person's right to purchase software and assume
the risk of it having bugs? You understand this is the same as saying
every software purchaser has to purchase insurance, don't you? The
seller will obviously include the risk of bugs in his asking price. If
that price is then too high for people to pay, he simply won't produce
the software.
I'd like to have the option of buying unwarranted software at a discount
and then managing the risk of it not working myself. I think you're
saying you don't want me to be able to enter that kind of a agreement with
a software publisher because you don't want to compete with me for the
software because you know you'll lose (i.e. the publisher would rather
work with me and my risk-acceptance than with you).
In your second paragraph, you actually state that your plan is already
the law -- that disclaimers of warranty are null and void. I assure you
this is not the case. With some specific exceptions, buyers and sellers
are free to assign the risk of defects any way they choose -- throughout
the U.S. and probably most other places too. Historically, the default
was no warranty -- unless buyer and seller agreed there was a warranty,
there wasn't one. Since about the late '60s, the default is usually some
warranty, and buyer and seller must specifically state it if they don't
want one.
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