[consulting] Contract > Developer liable for bugs?

[paola.dimaio at gmail.com]

Interesting discussion, the scope being beyond Drupal itself
One of my areas of work is software quality assurance process
In our world, a bug is not just a bug

Technically, bugs can be

defects
flaws
errors
failures

It is the failure that brings economic damage, 'loss'.
so, your client should be clearer about whose responsibility the
failure/loss is due to, and if this is caused by en error from your
part, or an error in some other part of the software development
process

Is it your job, or the clients job to write a decent specification
that reflects ttrue users/business/systems requirements?  failure to
identify or represent these properly may well result in systems flaws.
You responsibilty should be to interpret and implement correctly what
the client needs are

Maybe just try to be a bit more specific as to what kinda bugs you
will responsible for
then you can limit your liability just to some aspects of the implementation

PDM

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 11:57 PM, Adam Mordecai <mordecai at advomatic.com> wrote:
> additionally there is such a demand for drupalistas these days, they'd be
> foolish to walk away. Make them meet your demands. They need you more than
> you need them.
> Adam Mordecai
> Advomatic Partner
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>
> On Aug 6, 2008, at 8/6/08•9:51 , Roshan Shah - Gloscon wrote:
> 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;
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>> 11; Angela; Harry, 8; and William, 2)
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>
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-- 
Paola Di Maio
School of IT
www.mfu.ac.th
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