On Tue, 19 Sep 2000, dmolnar wrote:
especially software sold to us mass market consumers. I expect markets exist in which software has to be held to an extremely high standard of reliability (e.g. Space Shuttle, financial markets, health software, embedded systems spring to mind). How are liability issues dealt with in those fields, and how did they come to be that way? would the same thing happen with crypto and security software?
Client pays through the nose and software supplier accepts liability for software failure. If you want a software vendor to guarantee anything beyond the occupation of disk space, you're usually looking at five and six digit ($USD) prices for applications. Since that's not usually a consumer price point, this is called "Enterprise" software to distinguish it from the regular kind. It also usually comes with a consulting contract so that the supplier can make sure you don't install it wrong (say, having someone without admin priveleges run the installer and then suing for non-performance because it didn't update the registry) or on a "Pseudo-compatible" Operating system (as software written for AIX will sometimes run on Solaris, for example, but may crash at unexpected moments).... Most Enterprise software is written for Unix boxes. That which is not written for Unix boxes is written for NT boxes. Most enterprise software features "failover" capabilities, meaning it runs on a cluster or network of machines instead of a single box and if the particular box you're talking to crashes, your session will be handed off to another in such a way that you never notice. There are also marketing drones who apply the term "Enterprise Software" to whatever ordinary shrink-wrap software they're selling, because they don't know any better. (*sigh*) If it's priced less than $50K, just ignore them. Bear