Unfit for a particular purpose
Monday, November 2nd, 2009THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.
That’s a really popular line in Free Software licenses (I copied this one out of the FreeBSD license, which is a 2-clause, permissive, non-copyleft Free Software license, but something similar can be found elsewhere, e.g. in the GPLv3). It can be the thing to hide behind in a cop-out (as in “well, it works for me, don’t bother me with bug reports”) and it can be a powerful tool to avoid liability when bugs show up that a small group of developers didn’t foresee or missed in testing — liability that might bear no relation whatsoever to the rest of the economics of the situation. It is therefore vaguely amusing to see a local council suing over software unfit for a purpose — found on the Register. Since it’s very light on details, I’ll just put up a late night comment that it’s important to pick someone negotiating a software purchase contract who is fit for that purpose; that might ease some of the pain there.