Team A: A group of consumer advocates and standards organization officials
who argue that current practices of disclaiming all responsibility for the
correct functioning of software are scandalous. They suggest that individuals
and corporations who hold intellectual-property rights over a piece of software
should be at least partly responsible for the consequences of its failing to
work correctly, just as builders of bridges and manufacturers of machines are.
They propose a sliding scale of minimum personal and corporate liability in
order to encourage better practices in the software industry.
Team B: A group of software professionals, who believe that the proposal, while
a good idea in principle, will not work in practice. They feel that
standards are too difficult to formulate, that the current state of software
testing does not permit adequate certification of correctness, that blame for
the failure of a system is difficult if not impossible to pinpoint, and that
such a proposal could be very damaging to the computer software industry in
general.
Last updated Jan. 02, 2003.