On 2015-02-12 07:12 AM, Russell Reiter wrote:

What happens when you buy the words but they fail you. If you got them
free, there is no liability.

But there can be: a tort. Torts arise when you are injured or suffer loss outside a contract, arising from lack of reasonable diligence by the person causing the injury or loss. The ancient Debian ssh problem - where a well-meaning admin patched some code that used uninitialized variables, not realizing it would make connections less secure - could have created a tort.

 The minute you pay for the words, you are
thrust into the deep and murky world of administrative law.

Payment is only one form of consideration required to form a contract. I suspect that continued use/enjoyment/utility is the consideration for free software. But what of the software we don't know we're using, like the low-level stuff that moves our bits about the world: can I choose not to use that if it takes more than a reasonable effort to find out what it is?

Wiser folks may of course refer me to the reply given in Arkell v. Pressdram.

cheers,
Stewart
(a slightly apprehensive One+/Cyanogen user)