Comment In comparison (Score 1) 453
The comment about a puslisher requiring idemnification is a bit irrelevant to the situation at hand.
Let's assume for a moment I write a "bulletproof" piece of software. Checked every condition, made every test, did everything possible to make sure it never "failed" (for some definition of failure).
What about your hardware? What about the OS? What about the 300 windows trojans that reside on your system? Am I responsble for what happens when they cause the program to segfault/bluescreen? Do you blame Microsoft/Linus Torvalds/*BSD teams? Do you sue all the trojan writers (that would be nice, but really... )?? These are problems no publisher has, assuming their printing machine works that's the end of their "interoperability" issues, that is about as unlike the software world as you can get.
The key point this person misses is that "software" often isn't a single thing you can point to and say "that piece broke!". Occasionally its obvious something was crappily designed and should have been caught, but often it isn't. If an application in windows crashes... was it the OS? the application? the fact I had 10 viruses running? the anti-virus progam I installed that does wierd things to my PC and slows it down by 10% (funny how that sounds like a virus isn't it)?? Who the hell knows. And unless and until you can get every single piece of a system to pony up and write "bulletproof" software, this situation will not change.
I'm not advocating the current situation is good or that everyone shouldn't strive to be better, certainly much can and should be done. But I'm not holding my breath to wait for it...
Let's assume for a moment I write a "bulletproof" piece of software. Checked every condition, made every test, did everything possible to make sure it never "failed" (for some definition of failure).
What about your hardware? What about the OS? What about the 300 windows trojans that reside on your system? Am I responsble for what happens when they cause the program to segfault/bluescreen? Do you blame Microsoft/Linus Torvalds/*BSD teams? Do you sue all the trojan writers (that would be nice, but really... )?? These are problems no publisher has, assuming their printing machine works that's the end of their "interoperability" issues, that is about as unlike the software world as you can get.
The key point this person misses is that "software" often isn't a single thing you can point to and say "that piece broke!". Occasionally its obvious something was crappily designed and should have been caught, but often it isn't. If an application in windows crashes... was it the OS? the application? the fact I had 10 viruses running? the anti-virus progam I installed that does wierd things to my PC and slows it down by 10% (funny how that sounds like a virus isn't it)?? Who the hell knows. And unless and until you can get every single piece of a system to pony up and write "bulletproof" software, this situation will not change.
I'm not advocating the current situation is good or that everyone shouldn't strive to be better, certainly much can and should be done. But I'm not holding my breath to wait for it...
