On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 09:48:47AM +0000, Joseph T. Klein wrote:
Since software, in theory, can't cause physical danger, I suspect the shrink wrap license makes Microsoft immune to any liability.
If they advertise false claims then they could punishable under some states consumer protection laws. Look for the disclaimers.
Now if you claim that you are forced to agree to the shrink wrap licence because of they are a monopoly and you are forced to use the product ... an iffy argument ... then you may have a something.
A number of legal minds apparently are of the opinion that the recent Appeals court ruling helps open up that exact legal pinhole, a bit. However, ISTR that Microsoft recently had a number of suits in various state courts thrown out for lack of standing; IIRC Microsoft's claim that the Windows installations on new machines were a sale from Microsoft to the OEM, not Microsoft to the end-user, and therefore end-users were not eligible to sue Microsoft directly. I haven't bought an OEM machine in quite some time, but I think it's still the policy for Windows-based machines to indicate that if you have "any" problems (including software), that you have to go back to the hardware manufacturer for help, _not_ Microsoft. Although having no clue on the stats, I would assume that off-the-shelf purchases of Windows are not the majority of Windows "sales". Also, there's an element in the "Windows/IIS patches are freely available, so if an admin didn't patch, it's mostly his fault, no matter how crappy Windows/IIS might have been designed" thread, namely, that for the longest time, installing patches in most Windows systems was a dangerous undertaking; a significant portion of the time, installing a patch would/could cause something else to break, or even render the system unusable. This aspect has kept many Windows admins that I know from doing _anything_ to their systems except for dire emergencies, or well-tested (i.e. out in the field for several months, and tested on _other_ people's machines) service packs. Many of these difficulties were characterized either in being required to figure out to apply service packs and interim patches in exactly the right order (with exactly the right set of reboots), or in ending up reinstalling because Microsoft technical support didn't have the depth to be able to help with a complicated service pack / patch situation. -- Henry Yen Aegis Information Systems, Inc. Senior Systems Programmer Hicksville, New York