[consulting] Contract > Developer liable for bugs?

[Roshan Shah - Gloscon]

Agreed. Bug is a bug but the fundamental difference is that Open Source
software is not owned by 1 company just as it is in proprietary world.
Drupal is popular because of its stable core and a very strong developer and
user community. But there is no way any consultant or any consulting company
should accept any financial liability should there be any bug/defect in
Drupal - because it is collective development and contribution of many
people with no intention of getting $$$ by contributing back the code to the
community.

When someone works, they do work for here. Our contracts have nearly 60+
assumptions where we cover almost every risk. We even limit our liability to
core or contributed modules or the development we do to only 30 days post
deployment. We even have contracts written that clients have to test the
staging version and report all bugs within 7 days after we put the
development version on staging.

Adam is right - the way the original contract in this thread is drafted is a
huge risk. We certainly would walk away from the project rather than get
into such contracts.

Roshan
604-630-4292
http://www.gloscon.com
Skype : bpocanada

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 8:35 AM, Jason Flatt <drupal at oadaeh.net> wrote:

> On Wed Aug 6 2008 4:20:49 pm Sam Cohen wrote:
> >
> > When building a Drupal site, I would never assume liability for bugs,
> > unless bugs are very clearly defined as part of something I wrote.   It's
> > not like they're paying a $100,000 licensing fee for the software.  It's
> > open source after all. There are going to be bugs --
> >
>
> I've got news for you. There are bugs in $100,000 licensing fee software.
> It
> doesn't matter whether the source is open or closed. Making excuses for
> open
> source software doesn't help its acceptance.
>
>
> --
> Jason Flatt
> http://www.oadaeh.net/
> Father of Six:  http://www.flattfamily.com/ (Joseph, 15; Cramer, 13;
> Travis,
> 11; Angela; Harry, 8; and William, 2)
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> Drupal Fanatic: http://drupal.org/
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>



-- 
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Open Source Web 2.0 Development Company
*Drupal *Ruby on Rails
T : 604.630.4292 (Canada)
T : 323.319.3609 (US)
Skype : bpocanada
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