On 11/04/2019 12:27, Edward Bartolo via Dng wrote:
> It was surprising to me to read what Jaromil wrote in one of his
> replies regarding the April Fools prank. In short, the statement was
> that Devuan takes no responsibility whatever the outcome of its use.

Eh? That's exactly the same as most freely obtained open source
software, including most Linux distributions. In general, unless you
have a contract with the producer of some software then their
responsibility to you the user of the software is virtually non-existent
and your ability to claim against them in case of failure of the
software is also virtually non-existent. Even if you have a contract,
your ability to actually get recompense from them and their liability to
you may well be very limited.

If you want and/or need full support and recompense for failure, then by
all means pay for a service provider to provide this. Red Hat Enterprise
Linux is available, for example, and there are many consultancies whom
you can pay to configure and run things for you. But even then, their
liability towards you will tend to be contractually limited.

> Any invester will definitely make a lot of effort to avoid such a
> possibility that can ruin one's business, as confidence is a very
> determinant variable in economics. This simple principle does not need
> a degree in economics to understand.

And yet open source has been wildly successful. It did take a long time
for the corporate world (or at least their legal departments) to
understand that there was no one to sue if things went wrong but (a) in
many cases they seem to have realised that suing would rarely have been
genuinely useful anyway in practice and (b) they can, as above, pay for
support and contracts if they want them from commercial service
providers. The builder of the operating system or the software does not
have to be the commercial service provider.


--
Mark Rousell