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Ask HN: Is it possible to sue a software company for bugs?

1 points by gsivil ↗ HN
Have you encountered cases that people sue software makers for bugs? Is it common? Is it even possible?

5 comments

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skbohra123
Software are made to have bugs. I don't think that this is even possible or should be. But a certain amount quality threshold should be there for any software product. Software should do the primary task it is meant to.
geovedi
maybe you can. if you outsource the development and both parties agreed in the contract--to maintain certain level of software reliability/security.
mycroftiv
If you look at the majority of consumer software, be it open source or proprietary, you will notice that its license terms always explicitly disclaim all liabilities and warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. Using the software creates a legal agreement to not sue regardless of how buggy the software is. Software development contracts between businesses usually have different terms, so there might be grounds for suit depending on the contract in question. For the typical individual user, they are unlikely to have any legal recourse regardless of how badly software behaves. About the only exception I can think of right now is the infamous "Sony rootkit", but in that case, the major issue was exactly that the software was installed regardless of the user agreeing to the license and that its nature as being independent of the music content purchased was not disclosed.
prodigal_erik
Reckless incompetence pervades the industry because it's long been accepted that there are no real consequences for it. Even if I formally prove my program to be correct, I couldn't offer a warranty because I can't get a warranty that any platform will actually execute my program correctly. Compilers have bugs. CPUs themselves have bugs. And of course every mainstream OS is a huge chunk of native code that casually does unchecked pointer arithmetic, with a long sad history of bugs.

Nobody wants a verifiable platform badly enough to hire talented engineers who take quality seriously (a group that I only wish I could say includes me) to build one starting from sand. Instead we all ship crap for maybe 1/100 the cost, and get what we deserve.