When you don't have liability you don't have to worry about quality.
What we need is lemon laws for software.
--vadim
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. (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.) Any agreement two uncoerced people make with full knowledge of the terms is fair by definition. If I don't want to buy software unless the manufacturer takes liability, I am already free to accept only those terms. 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. 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. 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. Manufacturers would simply purchase more expensive liability insurance, raise the prices on their software, and continue to produce software that is no more reliable. DS