[long] Re: Legal traps in open source *WAY* OT.

[Antony Wuth]

Doug.Palmer at csiro.au (Doug.Palmer at csiro.au) wrote:

> > Suing someone because coffee is made with boiling water seems to me to
> > be like suing a car manufacturer because their engine gets hot.
> 
> There's a little bit more to it than that.
> 
> McDonalds was using superheated water (not just boiling) to get more coffee
> per coffee bean. The result was some seriously nasty burns -- not just the
> sort of burns you'd get from splilling boiling water on yourself. McDonald's
> refused to settle and so the case went to court. During discovery, 700
> similar cases were discovered, indicating that McDonalds knew very well that
> they were serving something more dangerous than a normal, sensible person
> would assume.

Good Coffee is almost always made with 'superheated' water which is
normally under pressure to force it though the grounds (have a look at
the nasty pressure containment on an average expresso maker)

The case seemed to hinge on the fact that McD's stored their coffee at
higher temperatures that other establishments - not at all 'superheated'
and not boiling either. The surprise that some people expressed that
fresh coffee (a drink traditionally prepared with freshly boiled water) 
was hot amuses me to this day. On a related not a government department
I used to work at banned the wearing of all gloves while drinking coffee
since someone managed to spill a drink they had prepared themselves
which was subsequently held against their skin by their woollen gloves.

The other complication is that different people will have different
tolerances to heat -> a newborn baby is going to suffer pretty awful
burns at temperatures that I can probably stand without too much problem.

Back on topic -> This kind of lawsuit is one of the main reasons I would
argue against liability for software developers -> when someone runs the
mkfs.ext2 (or worse still mkfs.vfat :) on their 'big important data
store' and decides to sue you because they didn't realise that the
command would actually remove all the data.. Even though a regular user
would be expected to understand - just like an experienced coffee user
would be expected to understand it may be hot.

I might hide & shut up now :)

Antony W.