[pp.int.general] Why Free Software misses the point

[Nicolas Sahlqvist]

Please note that also GPL, BSD etc. licence also has a limitation of
liability (you can't sue us clause) and the only thing a support agreement
can provide is a best effort, but it falls on the buyer to have a proven
backup strategy in place.

A application being installed in the background without the users knowledge
such as the Sony rootkit has no licence agreement so the creator has no
limitation of liability to lean against and is therefore on thin ice, but it
still falls on the user to have a proven backup scenario in the end.

There is also a chance that a commercial or open source project dies and
then you can not expect the same kind of support, still there is a lot of
ancient software out there still running...

Personally I prefer OpenSource application due to many years of personal and
professional experiences in the field.


- Nicolas


On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 1:14 PM, <quemener.yves at free.fr> wrote:

>
> ----- "Andrew Norton" <ktetch at gmail.com> a écrit :
> > And who do you put your trust in with free software? some anon
> > coders?
>
> They are not anonymous. Most of them are proud of the code they have
> written and you have access to the whole history of the code. THAT is
> accountability. Give me the name of the people who coded the SONY rootkit or
> who are responsible of Microsoft's clippy. For almost all open source
> project there is a publicly known boss and usually developpers also do
> commits using their real names. Transparency is here, accountability is here
> much more than the standard "you can't sue us" EULA of classical closed
> source software, and if you want the same kind of accountability that some
> closed source companies offer, nothing forbids you to pay for that
> supplemental service, while still having the source code at your disposal.
>
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