[log in to unmask] wrote:

>Which is what the courts would decree, an unachievable ideal. The court
>cases against IBM and Microsoft were amazing enough, for the ability to
>simultaneously get so much right and so much wrong. IIRC, the DOJ determined
>that MS charged too little for Windows, which hurt competition; and that
>they made too much money selling so many copies, so in the future, they
>should charge less.
>
I fear that I still possess a greater degree of faith in the fundamental soundness of the justice systems of the Western Europe and their descendent settlement colonies than you evidence.  The courts in general rule in accordance with socially acceptable norms and while excesses sometimes take place on both sides of what many would perfer as an acceptable median the general tendency is to get it right, even if it takes a few tries.

Of course, this pretty much describes software development as well. However, in court you are expected to be represented by an experienced professional while shrink-wrap software is turned loose on people with no idea of what they are doing. Consequentially the onus is on those that sell it to make their products safe, as well as useful, for their consumers.

Personally I have a big problem with software that installs and turns on every single possible feature, like installing MS-IIS only to find out that not only does installing this software put it on your computer, it acually enables it and starts the services by default, you have know to go in and turn off the unwanted services.  This is one of the reasons that Nimda and Code-Red were such big hits, thousands of servers were running IIS incidentally to having had a complete server install and the companies involved had no idea that the web services were actually running.

This approach to software installation was taken, in my opinion, simply to reduce Microsoft's support costs.  If every feature is turned on by default, and every service activates when installed, then users are less likely to encounter a situation where something doesn't work, and if they don't use the software then it really doesn't matter because no-one will notice.  The same thing goes on in MS-Office. Then something like milessa and nimda comes along and all of a sudden this situation results in clients collectively losing tens of millions of dollars because of a decision made by the vendor to economize on support costs for their software.

This is why eventually the law will get involved.  It isn't simply that software gets out into the street with errors, that will always happen. Rather it is the attitude behind the types of errors consumers are exposed to and the remedial costs that they must bear in consequence of decisions made for the benifit of the vendors that will result in intevention by legistators and the courts.

Regards,
Jim

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James B. Byrne                mailto:[log in to unmask]
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