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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: What do you want your ISP to block today?
On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, David Schwartz wrote: > > When you don't have liability you don't have to worry about quality. > > > > What we need is lemon laws for software. > > That would destroy the free software community. You could try to exempt > free software, but then you would just succeed in destroying the 'low cost' > software community. This is somewhat strange argument; gifts are not subject to lemon laws, AFAIK. The whole purpose of those laws is to protect consumers from unscurpulous vendors exploiting inability of consumers to recognize defects in the products _prior to sale_. The low-cost low-quality software community deserves to be destroyed, because it, essentially, preys on the fact that in most organizations acquisition costs are visible while maintenance costs are hidden. This amounts to rip-off of unsuspecting customers; and, besides, the drive to lower costs at the expense of quality is central to the whole story of off-shoring and decline of the better-quality producers. The availability of initially indistinguishable lower-quality stuff means that the market will engage in the "race to the bottom", effectively destroying the industry in the process. > (And, in any event, since free software is not really free, you would > have a hard time exempting the free software community. Licensing > terms, even if not explicitly in dollars, have a cost associated with > them.) Free software producers make no implied presentation of fitness of the product for a particular purpose - any reasonable person understands that a good-faith gift is not meant to make the giver liable. Vendors, however, are commonly held to imply such fitness if they offer a product for sale, because they receive supposedly fair compensation. That is why software companies have to explicitly disclaim this implied claim of fitness and merchantability in their (often "shrink-wrap") licenses. > Any agreement two uncoerced people make with full knowledge of the > terms is fair by definition. Consumer of software cannot be reasonably expected to be able to perform adequate pre-sale inspection of the offered product, and therefore the vendor has the advantage of much better knowledge. This is hardly fair to consumers. That is why the consumer-protection laws (and professional licensing laws) are here in the first place. > If I don't want to buy software unless the manufacturer takes > liability, I am already free to accept only those terms. There are no vendors of consumer-grade software who would assume any liability in their end-user licensing agreements. They don't have to do that, so they don't, and doing otherwise would put them at the immediate competitive disadvantage. > All you want to do is remove from the buyer the freedom to negotiate > away his right to sue for liability in exchange for a lower price. You can negotiate if you have a choice. There is no freedom to negotiate in practice, so the "choice" is, at best, illusory. Go find a vendor which will sell you the equivalent of Outlook _and_ assume liability. > If you seriously think government regulation to reduce people's software > buying choices can produce more reliable software, you're living in a > different world from the one that I'm living in. It definitely helped to stem the rampant quackery in the medical profession, and significantly improved safety of cars and appliances. I would advise you to read some history of fake medicines and medical devices in the US; some of them, sold as lately as in 50s, were quite dangerous (for example, home water "chargers" including large quantities of radium). Regulation is needed to make the bargain more balanced - as it stands now, the consumers are at the mercy of software companies because of grossly unequal knowledge and inablity of consumers to make reasonable evaluation of the products prior to commencing transactions. (I am living in a country having economical system full of regulation, and it is so far the best-performing system around. Are you suggesting that radically changing it will produce better results? As you may know, what you offer as a solution was already tried and rejected by the same country, leaving a lot of romantic, but somewhat obsolete, notions of radical agrarian capitalism lingering around). > In fact, if all companies were required to accept liability for their > software, companies that produce more reliable software couldn't > choose to accept liability as a competitive edge. So you'd reduce > competition's ability to pressure manufacturers to make reliable > software. I admire your faith in the all-mighty force of the competition. Now would you please explain how the single vendor of the rather crappy software came to thoroughly dominate the marketplace? (Hint: there's a thing called network externalities). Absolutely free market doesn't work, and that is why there are anti-trust, securities, commercial, and consumer-protection laws - all of which were created to address the actual problems after these problems were discovered in previously unregulated markets. "Freedom" is not the same as "fairness", and it is fairness which lets the better-for-consumer players to get upper hand, to make the "invisible hand" to work. For example of a really free market, go to Russia. Over there the businesses are often engaged in such practices (not common in places with better enforced laws) as killing competitors or freely buying government officials. They have way more actual freedom in choosing their business methods - but I doubt you would want to do business there. Oh, and consumers are also quite free not to buy from the bad guys... if they are willing to go without food or gas or apartments, etc. > Manufacturers would simply purchase more expensive liability insurance, > raise the prices on their software, and continue to produce software that is > no more reliable. If vendors will need to buy liability insurance at the rates which depend on the real quality of their products (the insurance companies are quite able to perform risk analysis, unlike the end-users), this will make improving quality not just a matter of nebulous and fungible repeat-business rate and consumer loyalty, but the hard, immediate, bottom-line impacting factor. --vadim
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