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

Nicolas Sahlqvist nicco77 at gmail.com
Thu May 13 16:31:54 CEST 2010


I forgot to mention that national laws can waiver the limitation of
liability clause such as it was in the red sky ruling in the High Court of
UK. They found the limitation clause unfair according to section 11(1) of
the Unfair Contract Terms Act:

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/05/12/red_sky_liability_ruling/


- Nicolas


On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Nicolas Sahlqvist <nicco77 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.
>>
>> ____________________________________________________
>> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
>> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
>> http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
>>
>
>
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