Comment on Anon witnesses excellent security
9point6@lemmy.world 2 days agoThis is legitimately it. The same reason corporations often pay for Linux (e.g. RHEL)—the people in charge want to be able to pick up a phone and harass someone until they fix their problem. They simply can’t fathom any alternative approach to managing dependencies.
InputZero@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Not just pick up the phone and harass someone but to also have someone to press a lawsuit against if things go really wrong. With free software the liability typically ends at the user which means all they can do is fire the employee and eat the loss. Suppose now corporate paid for it, well now there is a contract and a party that can be sued.
nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
As if the Eulas don’t make it all arbitration?
What software company allows liability for mistakes in a EULA?
Tja@programming.dev 2 days ago
Most do, but limited to the amount of the contract.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Companies and individuals play by different rules.
When a big company purchases software a team of people from both parties (whose entire job and career are based on doing this) negotiate with each other to decide exactly who is liable for what and to what degree.
When you purchase software you agree to let the company fuck you over at their leisure because you literally do not have enough hours in the day to even read everything you agree to, let alone understand it, let alone argue with it. And even if you did you don’t have enough bargaining power to make a large company care.
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I hear that a lot but would that actually work? Sure, you will get a redhat level 1 support employee within the hour for a severity 1 ticket. But does the actual contract (which I don’t have access to) make any legally binding guarantees regarding the time-to-resolution? I seriously doubt it. Which is to say – your legal team will be SOL.
They also won’t take responsibility for any fuckup on your part if you install a bad driver or deviate from the admin guides in anyway (which is why Legal says for a minor issue you can’t apply a patch from StackExchange, you must raise a ticket and wait 3 business days for RedHat to tell you to apply the patch from StackExchange).
Getting phished definitely falls in this category BTW. Vendors may or may not help you but they certainly won’t accept any liability.
It’s still a good enough safety net to have for corporations with no trustworthy in-house expertise as vendors do have an incentive to keep their customers happy and most will help to the best of their abilities (which often isn’t as much as one might think…), but it’s hardly a legal panacea. If you need guarantees against catastrophic financial losses, that is what insurance is for.