There was a lot of talk about this at the time, but I have heard nothing since. Is there any/much litigation going on over this issue? Perhaps by end users against the original software provider for providing a product with a major design flaw for the costs of debugging, or possibly against the bug fixers for taking money checking for/fixing a bug that was somewhat over hyped.
It may be that in the end there was no such litigation for good legal and factual reasons (that I can well imagine) but my simple general question is: is there or is there not such litigation? And if so, what are the allegations?
(and by the way please don’t let this deteriorate into a great debate about who was in the right and why there was no meltdown etc, it’s been done to death).
If one spends any time actually reading Software agreements rather than just clicking “I Agree” it’s fairly obvious that there are a host of conditions and terms regarding their use. Basically, if it breaks, you’re on your own.
Mortgage companies and long term lenders, for example, discovered the “Bug” a long time ago, probably in the 1960’s; 30 year mortgage payments were going to get horked starting in 1970, for example.
I’d say there was fair warning for anyone who cared to listen.
Much of the Y2K effort was spent on upgrading bespoke systems. E.g. your bank, insurance co, etc will have their own software that’s run by no-one else. (Unlike, for example, a typical Microsoft product which is run by millions.)
FWIW: my company did some Y2K upgrade work of this sort, and when we discussed the almost complete lack of news about problems following Jan 1st 2000, we concluded that a lot of companies/governments/councils etc must have had problems but decided it was better (from a publicity angle) not to make them public. I.e. the embarrassment of admitting that your organisation couldn’t cope with Y2K (and the potential custom lost because of this) was worse than the cost of quietly fixing the problem.