[LAU] Linux Audio podcast. episode003: commenting replies

[J. Liles]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 11:27 AM, Ralf Mardorf
<ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net>wrote:

> On Fri, 2013-08-16 at 11:14 -0700, J. Liles wrote:
> >
> > /* This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
> > WITHOUT */
> > /* ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
> > or       */
> > /* FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public
> > License for   */
> > /* more
> > details.
> >
> >
> > It was not put there without reason.
>
> The reason for this is coverage, but the target of FLOSS is to provide a
> quality level. Again, it's not black and white. If music apps shouldn't
> be perfect it's one thing, but regarding to e.g. security, privacy even
> this disclaimer won't protect an evil coder against a lawsuit.
>
>
I don't think you get it. It's not about protecting people from evil
programmers. It's about protecting programmers from litigious,
self-entitled people who assume that just because something exists, then it
must have been tailor made just for them and work in every way as they
expect. The kind of people who will shoot themselvse in the foot and blame
the maker of the pistol. It is to allow the programmer to write something
that works FOR THEMSELVES and share it freely with other people WHOM IT MAY
OR MAY NOT WORK FOR, without being held accountable for the fact that it
simply may not work for everybody. It is extremely difficult, if not
impossible, to write software that works in environments and use cases that
the programmer has never seen.

Consider free-software not as you would a tool that you bought from the
hardware store, but as a hand-crafted work of art that happens to have
functional applications.
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