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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Re: Software product liability
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Ted Leung has a post on product liability, and how it's going to impact the software industry. He sums it up thusly:
The software industry as a whole needs to find ways to improve software reliability. If we don't find a way to do it, the legal system is going to find way to do it for us.
I'm a whole lot less hopeful than that. Product liability cases often help one set of people, and one set of people only - the lawyers. Look at the Tobacco suits, and who got most of the money, for instance. And it's not necessarily the case that suits help - look at the stupid Stella Liebeck coffee case - the upshot of which is that I can't get a decent cup of coffee at McDonald's anymore. Liability suits are a very coarse grained way to fix a problem - and in some cases, the fix may well be worse than the original problem. Another example - go look at a ladder. Notice all the nasty warning labels on it? Those exist because of liability suits. Now imagine software with that kind of thing ....
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