[wplug] COLLABORATION AS DISTRIBUTED CAPITALISM?

[bgtrio at yahoo.com]

Fortunately, the sort of people who wouldn't use free software without a 
warranty are not the same people who want to mess with the source.

I think the solution is easy: offer the warranty only on the binaries, 
offer different warranties for various sorts of changes.

I think fraud laws would do enough to keep people from attempting to 
collect on the warranty on an altered binary.




On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, James O'Kane wrote:

> This one time, at band camp, bgtrio at yahoo.com said:
> 
> > It wouldn't really be that hard to offer the EXACT SAME warranty and 
> > support offered for Microsoft Windows out of the box and 
> > to advertise such, 
---SNIP!---
> Since IANAL, I can't say with any backing, but I read something to day 
> that brought up the pointabout providing a warranty to something that the 
> end-user can change at will. While that's isn't a show-stopper, it's 
> something that closed-sourse software doesn't have to worry about as much.
> 
> This was the concept that the makers of the IOpener hide behind when they 
> started coating their motherboards with epoxy to keep people from modifing 
> their product to do something useful.
---SNIP!