shap@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan S. Shapiro) (11/15/88)
Both Berkeley and Sun have now impuned my credibility, which I am sorry to say I do not find remarkable under the circumstances. Bill Nowicki of Sun went so far as to demand an apology: Bill wrote: >You made a very serious public charge when you claimed that Sun knew >about the bug but deliberately refused to fix it. Please post an >apology stating that Sun never received your bug report, or else be >prepared to have evidence to back up your claim. First, I would like to point out that I made no statement about whether Sun *deliberately* failed to fix the bug or not. I merely observed that the bug was *reported*. I can think of several ways in which it might come to happen, with the best of intentions, that a reported bug of this nature failed to get fixed. These require no assumption of malevolence on the part of Sun. Indeed, I think on the whole that Sun is pretty good about this sort of thing, Mr. Nowicki's current lack of calm notwithstanding. As I explained to Bill, I am no longer with the organization that reported the bug, and do not have access to the paperwork to demonstrate that they were submitted, nor can I be sure [it has been four years, and it wasn't very important in 1984] that the bug reports were not made verbally. I am nonetheless certain that a representative of Sun *did* receive my bug report. What is important, and evidently needs to be clarified out of my original message, is that I do not believe that any failure to fix the bug was intentional on the part of Sun or Berkeley. If I gave that impression, then I certainly do owe an apology. Independent of who is to blame in this case, I do believe that we may wish to consider legislation that will make companies legally responsible for failing (willfully or otherwise) to repair such bugs in a "reasonable" amount of time. At the present time the customer has very little legal support, and the bug repair process can result in serious bugs not being fixed. The vendors have a right to do triage based on what they are *able* to accomplish. There are only so many staff hours between releases. The question is, when the triage call turns out to be a miscall, should the customers have legal recourse? I would not see this as an issue were it not for the fact that when a *customer* installs such a fix on their own system, the vendor company invariably refuses to support the altered software. There are good reasons for this, but it puts the customer in a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. I know Sun and Berkeley don't like this idea. I am quite certain that it needs a better formulation. I would be interested in hearing the opinions of the *customers*. Jon