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Picking up on a theme from my earlier post, it is worth considering the issue of warranties because it underlies some of the reasons why some people are cautious about moving away from proprietary software. Free software (and most open source) comes with absolutely no warranty, not even fitness for purpose. Anyone who is surprised by this should immediately read the licence information of their particular email client or web browser. Most have it under the Help menu and it goes something like this: This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. This is actually very important - there is no warranty because there is no legal basis to offer a warranty (you don't register when you install it so upstream has no idea of who you are) and because the freedom of the source code means that anyone can modify the code before it reaches you, making it long-winded to identify precisely who would be responsible for implementing the warranty. This can scare people more used to the world of EULA's because they feel that they want someone to sue when things go wrong. There are significant problems with their view: 1. Just how many court cases have arisen from a user suing a software provider for damage alleged to be caused by the software? Of those, how many succeeded? Chances are, the enquirer does not work for the kind of company that has the resources to sue a company the size of Microsoft. 2. Warranties are not blanket promises or blank cheques - warranties are complex legal documents that try to *limit* the warranty to a very specific subset of circumstances and commonly do not include the most frequent or likely causes of incidents. 3. A software warranty is *completely* different from a software support contract (which is actually what people mean by "having someone to blame"). Free software DOES have software support contracts (ask RedHat) and therefore, the point to raise in discussions of "who do I blame when things go wrong with GNU/Linux" is simple: "Who can you blame now? Microsoft? Don't think so. You could try blaming the support company that sold you the software and/or installed it and guess what, you can arrange precisely the same support contract for any free software." Avoid comparisons with hardware warranties - software is not a physical object, it can only be stored on physical media (like speech), it is never a physical object in and of itself. (This has important consequences for software "ownership".) http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html "Cooperation is more important than copyright. But underground, closet cooperation does not make for a good society. A person should aspire to live an upright life openly with pride, and this means saying ``No'' to proprietary software. You deserve to be able to cooperate openly and freely with other people who use software. You deserve to be able to learn how the software works, and to teach your students with it. You deserve to be able to hire your favorite programmer to fix it when it breaks. You deserve free software." -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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