Taking On Software Liability - Again 382
An anonymous reader writes "You may remember an article in which a BBC correspondent wrote an article criticising current software licenses. In answer to the huge discussion that this brought about, he has written another article defending his views. From the article: 'It is possible to make error-free code, or at least to get a lot closer to it than we do at the moment, but it takes time and effort. Doing it will probably mean that commercially-available code is more expensive and cause major problems for free and open source software developers. But I still believe that the current situation is unsustainable, and that we should be working harder to improve the quality of the code out there.'"
yeah (Score:2, Informative)
Re:author is obviously unfamiliar with free softwa (Score:1, Informative)
No, I don't know that.
Would you mind telling me it's basis?
OSS software typically has fewer bugs because most OSS projects are so small in scope that it's possible to kill most bugs within the useful lifetime of the software.
The large OS software (Mozilla, Linux, OOo) that exists typically has as many bugs (or more, in the case of Firefox -- note [slashdot.org] all the exploits being released for it, now that it has market share) as it's commercial counterparts.
Where did I get that idea?
I pulled it out of my ass, just like you pulled that crap out of yours.
Re:There's more to it than just the code (Score:2, Informative)
amazing ignorance (Score:2, Informative)
Remeber IEFBR14 (Score:5, Informative)
Let us not forget the very modest program IEFBR14 - arguably the shortest
program ever written for use in a production environment. It ran on IBM's
System/360. (I rans it many times myself.) Its sole function was to
exit - nothing else. It was a whopping one machine instruction long - 2
bytes. It was even Open Source (BR14 is the assembly language version of
the instruction, which is the standard way programs exited). It was the
simplest possible program that one could write. If ever there was a
program that was going to be bug-free this was it!
It had a bug.
When a program exits on OS/360, it is expected to have set some bits to
indicate any errors. When a program is called, those bits are in an
unpredictable state. IEFBR14 had to be modified (doubling its length) to
clear the bits first.
Sigh...
More reasons (Score:4, Informative)
Another difference is, typically if an engineer says something is unsafe, people actually fucking listen to her.
Oh yeah, and you can't hide how a bridge works. Proprietary code encourages cut corners.
I believe that good software is attainable. But that won't necessarily come from legislation, it'll come from the industry growing up.
Re:Remeber IEFBR14 (Score:3, Informative)
It's a lovely story of course
I just updated wikipedia with the counterclaim
http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/tech/oreilly/more-ie
Re:We'll take the "Google News" way out... (Score:3, Informative)
You know that just because someone sticks the word "beta" next to a product, that doesn't actually remove any of the ethical or legal consequences for producing that product, right?
Re:Not entirely new... (Score:3, Informative)