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From: jon@weber.ucsd.edu (Jon Matousek)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: All Commercial Software Developers or Companies (pls read)
Summary: The good, the bad, and the ugly--how does one find good software?
Message-ID: <5513@network.ucsd.edu>
Date: 27 Jun 91 18:13:22 GMT
References: <5363@ryn.mro4.dec.com>
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Organization: Paragon Concepts, Inc.
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In article <5363@ryn.mro4.dec.com> long@mcntsh.enet.dec.com (Rich Long) writes:
>...
>...
> It would also be great if software companies took some responsibility in
> their licence agreements, instead of disclaiming everything! 

I agree with the above statement. Unfortunately the disclaimers are
driven by lawyers, not the moral desire of a software company. To
counter the disclaimers, Paragon places bugs, especially crashing or
corrupting bugs, at the top of its agenda. I've seen Nisus burn off
a couple of maintenance revs in short order, just because crashing bugs
were discovered.

On the same subject, but a slightly different perspective, it should be
realized that beta testers will not catch everything. No matter how hard
you try to find all of the bugs, there will always be some that slip by.
Nisus must pass through beta testers, hours running a random "monkey"
macro, and a macro that test major features. It is truely difficult to
find all of the bugs in a program that contains several hundred thousand
lines of source code.

With this in mind, it is my personal opinion that the end user needs to
realize that he/she has a responsibility to report problems (or ideas) about
software they are using to the developers of the software. This is
because software is a fluid medium, it is forever being improved upon.

-jOn

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