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

Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

Posted Dec 12, 2023 14:50 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
In reply to: Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem by farnz
Parent article: Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

Of course "Failure To Disclose" means a breach of contract from the seller's side...it would be akin to publishing stolen commercial code as MIT licensed.

My point still stands imho...in the US there is a longstanding precedent for "caveat emptor" ("as-is" carries meaning).

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Bottomley: Solving the Looming Developer Liability Problem

Posted Dec 12, 2023 14:55 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

In many jurisdictions, however, "as-is" does not carry the meaning you're describing - it means "I have told you everything I know about, and everything that's reasonable for me to know about, and I'm not taking responsibility further", and not "caveat emptor", where even if I should know about a problem, it's still your problem when you buy something from me.

In general, you can't, even in the US, say simply "caveat emptor"; you have to first make a good-faith effort to disclose what you know about the product. The only thing that you can do is be wrong in the buyer's favour - you can say "I believe this lock is trivial for a lock picking expert to open" when in fact it's hard for an expert to open, or "I believe a thief could break this safe open in under 30 seconds" when it'd take them 30 minutes to break it open.