zlacker

It's a mixed reaction from me.

Liability to the vendor sounds like a good idea - too many cowboys out there. Also with stretched supply chains someone has to pay attention.

But full liability..? What if I make a crappy, low effort, cheap spreadsheet app, someone builds their business on top of it and it goes boom. Should I really be liable, on the basis of what I consider a casual product?

And then, the main point of the article, what if Vim deletes my files? The suggestion seems to be that Vim "owner" (???) is liable.

It feels like there should be some slider as to what liability the creator accepts (OSS - none, casual app - not much etc) but then we're back to square one, everyone disclaims liability etc.

Maybe it should be somehow linked to the price paid for the software?

>>rich_s+(OP)
There is a principle that liability rests with the party best equipped to mitigate the liability. The commercial-ness of the product doesn't really enter into it, you see this kind of liability attribution all the time in non-commercial settings. Your product being "casual" isn't a defense per se.

The gray area where this often gets litigated is liability due to inappropriate use of a product, since liability for clear and obvious inappropriate use typically falls on the user. What constitutes an "inappropriate use" is frequently unclear, especially for casual products where you are unlikely to clearly document and delineate what does and does not constitute appropriate use. If you read the fine print of commercial enterprise software licenses, it frequently has a long list of applications for which the software is deemed inappropriate for legal purposes. The product may in fact be fine for those applications but the producer does not want to take on the liability.

It is difficult to enumerate all possible inappropriate uses of software. Enumerating inappropriate use cases to limit liability arguably conflicts with open source's principle of non-discriminatory licensing.

>>jandre+R6
TFA seems to imply that under the proposed rules, none of that careful analysis will matter. A software "vendor" is liable and that's the end of the story. Microsoft or GNU foundation, doesn't matter

TFA might of course be wrong, but otherwise, my concerns stand I think.