Last month McAfee updated their anti-virus software, which ‘caused a worldwide meltdown of XP PCs’. In our case, this knocked us out for the entire day. This month there was another update that caused the antivirus program to believe incoming FTP files carried viruses and denied access. Due to the scattered timing of incoming FTP files, we received some before the update and others after it was fixed. We’ve received files from all but one of the others, and they may be waiting for month-end.
But I wonder: How responsible are software companies, like McAfee in this case, to losses their products cause customers? Are businesses compensated in any way, perhaps free maintenance for a given time or compensatory products? Or do they say, ‘Oops. Our bad. Sorry you had to pay salaries to all of your employees, and sorry for the loss of revenue. That must suck.’?
I’m sure it’s all spelled out in the shrink-wrap agreement. I’d bet that the bottom line is - they don’t take responsibility for anything. Essentially, the software could destroy all of your data, blow up your PC, and cause Global Warming, and it’s not their problem.
At most, they will say that the limit of their liability extends to the purchase price of the software.
I’ve been thinking about this lately with my TV problem I asked about a couple of days ago. I’m willing to bet that even if I were to get them to acknowledge that they ruined my TV’s tube, they’ll show me something I signed that limits their liability to the amount of money I paid them to fix what was originally wrong with the TV, so I’ll get my $200 or whatever back. Whoopee.
When you buy a license to a program as an individual user, you’re subject to the shrink-wrap license agreement. But when a company purchases an enterprise license covering 1,000 or 10,000 systems, they may negotiate a contract that may give them more or fewer rights than the shrink-wrap agreement. So a large company may get additional assistance when dealing with an issue like this.
And in this case, McAfee has said that it will compensate home and home office users for expenses incurred in dealing with this issue.
Also, despite the shrink wrap agreement, many states say that certain rights cannot be disclaimed. One of those could include fitness for the purpose advertised, which this McAfee update clearly was not.
An actual lawyer (or even paralegal) can fill you in on the details, but this is how I understand the situation
I spent a portion of my career as a technical sales rep for enterprise software contracts. I would not be surprised to see this sort of problem raised by the customer during the ‘Let’s make a deal’ portion of the next contract negotiation. Generally, they win some sort of concession if they raise a big enough stink.