Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem [LWN.net]

Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

Posted Dec 12, 2023 11:55 UTC (Tue) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641)
In reply to: Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem by snajpa
Parent article: Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

Pretty certain in a lot of jurisdictions they will take down the bridge if you open it for the general public.

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Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

Posted Dec 12, 2023 12:40 UTC (Tue) by snajpa (subscriber, #73467) [Link] (1 responses)

I was thinking about a situation when the plans for the bridge are picked up by a party completely unrelated to the hobbyist engineer, perhaps even without their knowledge at all. Imagine if someone decided to build that bridge and it'd have passed through the whole process with all the checks and get built. That is IMHO in the same league as FOSS + "AS IS" in the licences. I'd say there is a hard boundary and the problem has started when the free plans were picked up to build an actual product that was monetized, rather than the moment when the plans with the flaw were published free of charge (and "AS IS").

Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

Posted Dec 12, 2023 12:45 UTC (Tue) by snajpa (subscriber, #73467) [Link]

To extend that line of thing a little further: we should IMHO be warning hobbyist developers about the looming support contracts boom, not the "looming developer liability problem", so that they don't get burned by conditions too unfavorable to them. Profit-makers are going to try to shift the blame in the cheapest ways they can. So contracting that original enthusiast and shifting the blame to them is a no brainer. IMHO there should be a place where turn to for legal support/advice when that comes.