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Comment by LtWorf | Hacker News Reader

This is an easy way that will achieve the goal of completely killing free software, destroying the entire software industry in the process.

I contribute stuff for fun, for free. Now I also have to PAY to do that??? Plus anyone can just steal my identity… I have to show my ID every time I sleep at a hotel. Hundreds of people have a copy of my id and could use it to open an account in my name online…

Do you guys ever read what you write? Did you stop to think about it for more than 0.3 seconds?

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I actually meant quite the opposite: that contribution should be paid. Yes, it would have to be ring-fenced so that society and the ecosystem would know who contributes what. That would also mean though that someone assumes liability for a piece of code; when you do that, you add value (economic not just source-code) and thus you should / have to be paid --by whom? the hundreds of commercial companies that use your code and whose liability you are reducing.

But every piece of software is legally held warrentless - no warranty is the heart of Microsoft, Oracle and the GPL licenses.

Yes I know the stories of “insurance made steam boilers safer”. And it’s true. But it also stopped innovation in the space before Charles Parsons came along and ignored the whole thing (military industrial aristocracy)

I think the answer sits somewhere in “have less stuff”.

We have millions of lines of code in all walks of life and Inswear we are orders of magnitude over engineered in almost all cases.

If you work for a large company try counting how many different ETL solutions exist, CSV uploaders, data lakes, warehouses and so on

Then imagine having one library to do it.

Somehow we need to get there for … everything

Agreed and I dont believe "no warranty" can last that much longer, or in fact should. It was encouraged back in the day when all this computer stuff was new and either walled-off in unis or enterprises or in hobbyist's basements. But the real risk now is in the interconnections; the potential impact is order of magnitudes larger.

The closest metaphor is cars I think. And yes you can argue that innovation in cars has slowed down but also a 'minimum floor' of safety and efficiency forced by governments and insurers has made new entrants more likely. I.e. you shouldn't need to only trust Oracle, SAP with your business because then, erm, you'd have exactly the current situation in enterprise software...

Why wouldn't people keep making open source, say "hey, no warranty!", but companies that use it in "load bearing contexts" have to assume liability for their choices, assuming someone enforces that.

Isn't that pretty much the way the world works now? What needs to be fixed?

>Agreed and I dont believe "no warranty" can last that much longer, or in fact should. It was encouraged back in the day when all this computer stuff was new and either walled-off in unis or enterprises or in hobbyist's basements. But the real risk now is in the interconnections; the potential impact is order of magnitudes larger.

Ok, I can blow your mind.

You can start your own software projects and offer them with warranty. And people can join you, if they want.

And they will not want :D Not unless significant income is balancing the significant risk.

Certainly not for a few € of donations.

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