Ted Byers wrote:
From: Dirk Gently [mailto:dirk.gently00@gmail.com] Sent: May-15-12 3:58 PM To: opensuse Subject: Re: [opensuse] gnu libc manual wrong?? concat (const char *str, ...) doesn't work...
Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2012-05-13 01:03, Anton Aylward wrote:
For the likes of us, the whole 'first to market and never mind the bugs' attitude is JUST PLAIN WRONG!
You tell that to the bosses. They know not anything about programming, just money.
What's needed is some liability lawsuits. All of these "Not fit for any purpose" on software packaging are just so much nonsense. I would argue in court that they are nothing less than quaint decoration, because if the software vendor REALLY believed that the software is not fit for any puropose, then they wouldn't have gone to the trouble of advertising its capabilities (both in the media and on the package itself) and writing and distributing user manuals expressing EXACTLY what the software is supposed to do (regardless of whether it actually does it or not).
Once management finds out that legally defending defective software takes all the profit out of the "We got our bugware to market first" strategy, we will see a change.
Product liability law doesn't tolerate this sort of shoddyness for even a simple lawnmower, why should it be tolerated in software which has far greater impact on humanity?
It doesn't much matter what the laws have to say if you're in a David and Goliath situation. My father used to work in Quality control at an electronics company that was, and still is, a huge international entity. In that role, he worked closely with the design engineers. Way back when I was a kid, he told of a story of an interaction he had with this kid fresh out of university whose first task was to design a new transformer for the company's home entertainment products. He was given the requirements and given time to finish his design and make a few prototype to prove his design met the requirements. After a suitable amount of time he had finished the design and prototypes, and presented them to his supervisor stating that his design met the requirements specified to a finer degree of tolerance than was required, and that his transformers could be guaranteed to last a lifetime. His supervisor examined the work and found the kid's claims justified, and then told the kid, "OK , now go back and modify the design so that mean time before failure is 3 years." The kid was devastated that the boss would demand such a sacrilegious debasement of his first commercial product, and spent hours talking about it with my father. My father told him that if he wanted to remain employed, he'd have to do as he was told, however obscene that act seemed. While my father was as outraged by the demand placed of the kid, he knew there was nothing either of them could do about it. In brief, my father gave him the realist's perspective: management makes the decisions about what gets done by whom, and you either give them what they want or they will get rid of you. He had seen it often enough before. Management wanted a product that would fail quickly, so that the consumer could be more easily tempted to buy the next latest and greatest product. Planned obsolescence he called it. I call it deliberately marketing products you know are defective, but in a way that t he defect doesn't appear until after a usually short warranty period. My landlord told me of a problem he had with his car, which was just 3 years old. There is a known fault with the electrical panel in that it corrodes easily, but generally not until after he warranty period has expired. He was told it would cost $10,000 to fix it, and even though the dealer and manufacturer agreed it is a manufacturing defect, it is not covered under warranty because it failed after the warranty expired. Fortunately he knew a chap that works as a mechanic and who knew both how common the problem is and how to fix it practically for a song (so there was an inexpensive fix that the dealership also would have known about but chose not to use). Clearly the attitude my father experienced with management half a century ago is still commonplace among large manufacturers now. And thy get away with it because no-one who cares about the issue has pockets deep enough to challenge them. And it isn't jus t the sof tware industry in which this happens. It is all industries.
Those working for large companies often don't have a choice in the quality of product they deliver. They deliver what management mandates. And the consumers don't have pockets deep enough to let them fight a huge international manufacturer.
Product liability laws sound great, but what good are they if no-one enforces them, and if no-one who cares about product quality has pockets deep enough to fight the large corporations on the matter.
Three words: Class Action Lawsuit. It's amazing how many hours a lawyer will work, without any money up front if he thinks he can get a 1/3 cut of a $1 settlement for each of 10 million or more plaintiffs, all combined into only one court case. You don't go after a complete giant like Microsoft, you just go after a smaller vendor of similarly shoddy software who can't afford to keep a case in the preliminary phase for 10 years, and thereby set a precedence. Once that's done, then you can go after the big fish. And if a judge gets a product liability suit against, oh, say Windows in general for being a crash-happy mess ... with precedence set in an earlier case .... then he'll entertain strategic delying motions for only so long... after all the judge is just as sick and tired of paying through the nose for crapware as everyone else.
I don't think we will ever see a significant change.
I'm still holding out hope.
Cheers
Ted
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