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> You're just a small step away from making it an obligation rather than an optional thing for users to report bugs, the only difference is that for you the obligation is a moral one rather than a legal one. I'd argue that a person does have that obligation in some circumstances, yes. And yes, I am thinking in moral rather than legal terms. The legal picture is pretty far outside my expertise, and the professional ethics of software engineering (which would in turn inform the legal picture) seems to be woefully opt-in. As you say, 'moving fast and breaking shit,' perpetual beta test mode, etc. So I'd put the legal stuff aside for now. For me, the key is that "user" is a deceptive term here. A mere user cannot point to a small piece inside a much larger machine and say "that will blow up occasionally, and I know exactly when." We are talking about engineers. Or at least, I was thinking of the professional obligations of engineers - on the user side of the fence and the vendor side of the fence - and that was informing my comments. > Keep in mind that users have their own work to do, are not on the payroll of the vendors usually have forked over cold hard cash in order to be able to use the code (ok, not in the case of open source) and tend to be less knowledgeable about this stuff than the vendors. Yeah, and I don't think I disagree with you in the "user" case. I really think a software engineer finding a CPU bug is a different case. It seems me that if we're in possession of knowledge of something as serious and wide-reaching as a CPU bug, we have a reproducible test case, and we don't do anything with it (I mean, at least a tweet or something, for the love of God) we are part of the problem with our profession. |
(1) a payment from the vendor to the reporter compensating them for time and effort spent at getting the bug to be reproduced
and, crucially,
(2) a requirement for all vendors of software and hardware to timely respond to bug reports and to have a standardized reporting process.
In that case I can see how such a shared responsibility would work, but as it is the companies get the benefits and the users get the hardship with a good portion of reported bugs (sometimes including a solution) that go unfixed, that's not a fair situation.
Case in point: I've reported quite a few bugs to vendors over the years but I've stopped doing it because in general vendors simply don't care, most of the time bug reports seem to result in a 'wont fix' or 'here is a paid upgrade for you with your fix in it'.