No, I think what people are implying is that commercial licensing of software solves the trust/responsibility aspect of software. With proprietary software, there are legal remedies to malfeasance.
In which case that is still both obviously nonsense and irrelevant on two counts.
It's irrelevant because this was about FOSS vs. closed source, not about commercial licencing vs. noncommercial licencing. Even if commercial licencing were the solution, that says nothing about whether the commercial licence should be FOSS or closed source.
And it is also irrelevant because there are broadly the same legal remedies to malfeasance in all cases. If you are breaking the law, you are sill breaking the law if you are publishing your source code, and you are still breaking the law if your are doing it non-commercially.
And in so far as you mean liability for defects rather than malfeasance, it is obviously nonsense that there are any generally applicable effective legal remedies against terrible proprietary code if you look at the real-world quality of products in the market. You might be able to put together a contract that helps with that, but (a) that is far from the norm and (b) is obviously still irrelevant to whether the code should be open or closed.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC|7 years ago
It's irrelevant because this was about FOSS vs. closed source, not about commercial licencing vs. noncommercial licencing. Even if commercial licencing were the solution, that says nothing about whether the commercial licence should be FOSS or closed source.
And it is also irrelevant because there are broadly the same legal remedies to malfeasance in all cases. If you are breaking the law, you are sill breaking the law if you are publishing your source code, and you are still breaking the law if your are doing it non-commercially.
And in so far as you mean liability for defects rather than malfeasance, it is obviously nonsense that there are any generally applicable effective legal remedies against terrible proprietary code if you look at the real-world quality of products in the market. You might be able to put together a contract that helps with that, but (a) that is far from the norm and (b) is obviously still irrelevant to whether the code should be open or closed.