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by emcrazyone
3038 days ago
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" It's quite clear that if certain changes result in different behavior, then whomever made those specific changes is responsible for the resulting behavior." Umm, well people lie. Or you make the change for yourself and your fellow farmer. Your fellow farmer is killed and his wife sues the tractor company. Do you need more examples or is it clear now? This is just my opinion. Customers are not entitled to source code or what I call the work product. You're entitled to the end product you purchased, the binary, which the source code is compiled to produce. |
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Yes, like the companies that turn their products into black boxes, and rely on tricked human instincts to write off the magnitude of what the "tiny chip" contains.
It's so weird when the spectre of dishonesty is used to justify more secrecy, when sunlight is the best disinfectant!
Does the checksum of the software match an official one that company has released (and not given notice of deprecation)? If not, then how did the image get into this state? That's a clear indicator of responsibility, but requires a paradigm that reifies the fact that software can be changed.
> Your fellow farmer is killed and his wife sues the tractor company
Anybody can sue anybody at any time, regardless of merit. Bringing up this one possibility is fallacious.
> You're entitled to the end product you purchased, the binary
And yet companies constantly refrain that the end user hasn't purchased the binary, but only a license. Needless to say, this is all based on commercial laws (as opposed to manifest natural laws), and are thus straightforward to change when they're no longer sensible. As far as I'm concerned, copyright should require registering the full source code - the output of a compiler is not a novel creative work!
The product the customer purchased is a tractor, part of its implementation being software. As such, the owner has the right to inspect and repair its functionality and parts. Anything less is dishonest and will hopefully not persist very long given the modern prominence of software.