Thread: Linux, FOSS and the Cellular Empire
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krisse is offline krisse
2009-05-18 , 14:15
Posts: 1,540 | Thanked: 1,045 times | Joined on Feb 2007
#4
Originally Posted by TA-t3 View Post
I work for a software company. When someone buys a product from us they get a time-limited warranty (at least several months, depending on the product, the price, and other things). After that they pay for fixes. Just like our hardware products really.
That's very interesting. Can people actually buy stuff from you (in the legal sense of "buy"), or are they just "contractually licensing" it like the BSA said?


Our software is specified to fulfill a set of requirements, and that's how to determine if there's a warranty issue or not.
Obviously I don't know what your company's policy is, but according to the BBC article's example a game that cannot be finished is not grounds for a consumer getting their money back. Shops might choose to refund, but they're not obligated to do so.

That sounds like there's no outside set of legal standards that software has to adhere to, because a game that can't be completed due to a bug clearly isn't fit for purpose.


As for OSS, it could be given away for free, or sold. A reason to sell it for money could be to provide a warranty, which could make it interesting for customers to actually pay for OSS.
Yes indeed, in fact isn't that quite a common business model for OSS?

It would also sound very fair, if people are bothering to help you with free-of-charge software then they should be paid for the help. No pirate would disagree with that.

(OTOH there might be some companies who don't want things to work too well out of the box because it would mean less support income.)