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

[Doug.Palmer at csiro.au]

[Snip comment 'superheated' which I got wrong. I was also reading
farenheight as celsius.]

The basic comment I would make is if:

* you're in the food industry -- and can therefore be expected to have a
higher level of expertise than most people;
* it is a general practise to serve coffee at 140F -- which is the
temperature it's normally served at at home;
* you sell at 180F,
* 155F is the temperature beyond which serious burns ensue;
* and you know it

then you're asking for liability.

> 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 would expect any piece of software which caused potentially disasterous
results to have a 'do you really want to do this?' question as a default
(and a -f option). If you don't modify your software to handle known
usability (and other) problems, then you're a pretty piss-poor programmer.
And I'm not likely to let the 'rm * .c' problem off the hook, either. It's
elementary software engineering. (What I think of Microsoft products can be
left as an exercise.)