GNU and the issue of support

[Paul Shields]

rlin at cs.ubc.ca (Robert Lin) writes:
>I'd willingly and happily pay which ever commercial company good money, if
>I can have the same level of openness that I'd get for free with GNU.
>If whenever I report a bug, and they know its there, but can't fix it,
>I'd like to receive a copy of the source code so I can fix it myself.

>I'd even be willing to protect their commercial interest by signing a
>non-disclosure, and after submitting my fixes, destory my copy.

It's time to write into law that software warranties give the user
some form of support, as for example the GNU license.  You always can
have the source code.  It may not be cheap to fix a problem, but it's
almost always cheaper than redoing something from scratch.

It really irritates me when, time after time, upon calling a company
and reporting a problem I have with their software, going over the
usual answer of "oh yes, we know about that, but why don't you grit
your teeth and wait -- we'll probably generate a fix by the time hell
freezes over," etc, and ask if there is any way I can negotiate a
source licence, they say, flatly, "no".  In case you were wondering,
it's happened to me more than once.  Of course I have no legal
recourse because the software contains the usual non-warranty.

It's time to make laws to invalidate those non-warranties.
Suggestions as to how such a law should be worded?


Paul Shields