business [LWN.net]

business

Posted Feb 6, 2012 9:03 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: About the calculus for the project by alankila
Parent article: A tempest in a toybox

Another quote from the same article:

"if you make MONEY selling something, you'd better do it properly, or you will be held responsible for the trouble it causes" (emphasis is mine).

It's really more about *business* rather than closed source. If you sell open source then you are accountable (or should be). If you give closed source software for free then you should not. In the latter case you typically do not even know who is using the software and for what.

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business

Posted Feb 6, 2012 11:31 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

I think there's no point to make it hinge on money exchanging hands, especially as a liability rule such as this would lead to it being a standard practice to obfuscate this sort of liabilities.

business

Posted Feb 6, 2012 16:47 UTC (Mon) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

The reason money is a factor (AFAICT) is that in many cases your liability is limited to what you were paid for the product. Ergo, if you give something away for free, your liability is minimal, whereas if you sell it, your liability could potentially be greater than your net profits.