CDR: RE: was: And you thought Nazi agitprop was controversial?

[Ray Dillinger]

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