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 COLUMN
Modest proposal II AMONG THE platitudes we've heard from the media in the wake of the past summer's accounting scandals were the words "corporate responsibility." The funny thing is that I always thought that corporations were devised to relieve individuals of responsibility for their actions.
But there are more than a few differences between cars and computers. If we buy a lemon, we can sue the dealer and the manufacturer. If a car component fails during reasonable use in a way that causes economic loss, injury, or even death, we may have a case against the supplier as well as the automaker. Try suing a software vendor for economic losses; in most cases, the take-it-or-leave-it license doesn't allow for these damages. With software, the only stick most customers -- businesses and consumers alike -- possess is the option of finding another supplier. The problem with that approach is that you don't have a lot of options in office suites or operating systems. There's no incentive in corporate America to produce quality goods without a punishment for producing shoddy and dangerous ones. Of course, even if there were civil or criminal penalties for companies that produced software with security flaws, it might be tough to pin the responsibility on an individual or even a corporation. Think about all the foundation work in TCP/IP that was done on college campuses. Are we now going to hold liable U.C. Berkeley, MIT, and most of the Big 10 for software that was developed 10 or 20 years ago and was never intended to morph into this Brobdingnagian beast called the Internet? Let's face it: Such an arrangement would be a lawyer's nirvana. Could I in good conscience inflict such a torrent of legislation upon our already overburdened court system? I much prefer something I tried a long time ago with a vendor whose software was critical to my business's operations but wasn't up to par. I prepared a bill itemizing the time our company's staff had put in testing the software, replicating and documenting the errors, and recovering from software failures. When I presented the invoice at the next meeting with the vendor, I was reminded that our agreement precluded such a billing -- so I didn't get the money. But I did get my point across: The pace of bug fixes on that project picked up dramatically. Vendors should stand behind their products and accept responsibility when their products are defective -- the question is how to punish miscreants. It's too bad that trial by ordeal is no longer an option. Jail time and fines will have to do. P.J. Connolly is a senior analyst at the InfoWorld Test Center. Contact him at pj_connolly@infoworld.com.  RELATED ARTICLES  A modest proposalRELATED SUBJECTS SecurityClick here for all of P.J. Connolly's past columns. SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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