On Sat, Apr 07, 2001 at 11:23:37AM +1000, Thomas Beale wrote:
>
> In the pure open source model, acceptance of this sort of responsibility is not
> available; at the legal level, it actually requires that the engineers
> collectively accept responsibility (and maybe damages) for: late deliveries
> (consider how important the timing of switching over to a new power station etc),
> functional failures (power blackouts, gas flow failures) and disasters (train
> collisions, furnace explosions). People who write software for free and in their
> spare time do not have the resources to accept this kind of responsibility.
>
> I am not sure my feelings would be any different as the CIO of a hospital or
> other health facility.
>
I must say, I was quite surprised when I saw a message from some
embedded developer on the linux-kernel mailing-list complaining that his
pacemaker, which used a linux-kernel on ARM hardware, crashed after 5
days during animal testing....
I wouldn't want to be the human wearing such a pacemaker and learning
that you'd have to stay in hospital until a new version was available.
Jurriaan
--
I am the fingernail that scrapes the chalkboard of your soul
Darkwing Duck
GNU/Linux 2.4.3-ac3 SMP/ReiserFS 2x1743 bogomips load av: 0.00 0.00 0.00
