Chandrashekhar Mullaparthi wrote:
On 23/12/03 12:10 pm, "Annamalai Gurusami" annamalai.gurusami@email.masconit.com wrote:
Chandrashekhar Mullaparthi chandrashekhar.mullaparthi@t-mobile.co.uk writes:
Well, I dont agree with the analogy. A book is for learning about something. Usually, software is a tool/utility.
Like Ramanraj said in a message previously, if a book is crap, the author wont sell anymore and that is the end of his/her career as an author. The same cant be said of big corporations which make crap commercial software.
The same does apply to _big_ corporations. If their software is not useful, then it is not going to sell.
Really? What about Microsoft? Exception? I think it's more the norm than the exception. And, the point is not whether a paticular piece of software is useful. The point is what happens when it breaks. That's where warranties come in.
Chandru
In the free software community, when software breaks, we can report the bug to the developers, and a patch is normally made available for the whole community, and a more robust code evolves.
As a standard measure, most System Administrators would take back ups of important data, and the loss if any, would be only for the period from the last back up. If backups are made every day, one can minimise the damage very considerably.
No warranty clause in the GPL actually promotes the evolution of robust code for the whole community. If a person x gives warranty to user y, then the knowledge about the bug and its solution would remain only between x and y alone, and the rest of the community may suffer because of this. It would be best not to give any warranty at all, and if a bug comes up, to fix it either through the developers who maintain the source or anybody else willing to help, for free or for a fee, and make it public and open to all. It therefore looks like no warranty is the best warranty for free software!
So far as our non-free friends are concerned, the warranty itself lends to several mischiefs. RMS spoke as follows at MIT, Chrompet, Chennai, in a speech (that was transcripted by Suraj), as follows:
Because one of the consequences of Free Software is that there is a free market for all kinds of supports and services, and the result is you can expect better support and service for free software. For a proprietary program, support is a monopoly. Because only the company that owns the program in general can give you any support - except for the most superficial kinds. So the result they don't have to care and they know it. They'll tell you: "Pay us and we'll let you report a bug". And if you do that they'll tell you, "In six months there will be an upgrade. Buy the upgrade and you'll see if we've fixed this bug and you'll see what new bugs we gave you" [Laughter] . ..With a proprietary program all you can do is put blind faith in the developers and often they don't deserve it.