I think the warranty issue has more than just the simple ‘insurance’ company approach..
1) How do you produce a warranty for open source software? Who is going to stand behind it when nothing is charged for it?
2) Does anyone who is pushing this realize that the cost to produce software that complies with the warranty requirements would be like producing FAA certified software and with the associated costs and prices?
3) How are you going to insure against the warranty? Do you also insure for potential losses? What if the software does stress analysis for airplane wings? Stress analysis for skyscrapers?
I could see a requirement for software to have fixes for bugs over a period of ‘x’ years.. with other constraints (ie timeliness of fix, not reducing functionality as a result of fix etc).. but in many ways, better competition.
The only people I can see winning in this, are lawyers in the lawsuits that would appear.. oh yeah.. this was authored by the American Law Institute.. figures.
