I think the example here is that the designer draws a bridge for a railway model, and someone decides to use the same design and sends real locomotives across it. Is the original designer (who neither intended nor could have foreseen this) liable in your understanding?
If a construction firm takes an arbitrary design and then tries to build it in a totally different environment and for a different purpose, then the construction firm is liable, not the original designer. It'd be like Boeing taking a child's paper aeroplane design and making a passenger jet out of it and then blaming the child when it inevitably fails.
Or alternatively, if Boeing uses wood screws to attach an airplane door and the screw fails that's on Boeing, not the airline, pilot or screw manufacturer. But if it's sold as aerospace-grade attachment bolt with attachments for safety wire and a spec sheet that suggests the required loads are within design parameters then it's the bolt manufacturers fault when it fails, and they might have to answer for any deaths resulting from that. Unless Boeing knew or should have known that the bolts weren't actually as good as claimed, then the buck passes back to them
Of course that's wildly oversimplifying and multiple entities can be at fault at once. My point is that these are normal things considered in regular engineering and manufacturing
Not making an argument. Asking a clarifying question about someone else’s.
> It'd be like Boeing taking a child's paper aeroplane design and making a passenger jet out of it and then blaming the child when it inevitably fails.
Yes exactly. You are using the same example I used to say the same thing. So which part of my message was ridiculous?
> you're just misrepresenting your parent poster's comment
I did not represent or misrepresent anything. I have asked a question to better understand their thinking.
> If you didn't intend your comment as a criticism, then you phrased it poorly.
Quite probably. I will have to meditate on it.
> Do you actually believe that your scenario happens in reality?
With railway bridges? Never. It would ring alarm bells for everyone from the fabricators to the locomotive engineer.
With software? All the time. Someone publishes some open source code, someone else at a corporation bolts the open source code into some application and now the former “toy train bridge” is a loadbearing key-component of something the original developer could never imagine nor plan for.
This is not theoretical. Very often I’m the one doing the bolting.
And to be clear: my opinion is that the liability should fall with whoever integrated the code and certified it to be fit for some safety critical purpose. As an example if you publish leftpad and i put it into a train brake controller it is my job to make sure it is doing the right thing. If the train crashes you as the author of leftpad bear no responsibility but me as the manufacturer of discount train brakes do.
And the only reason the commenter I linked to had that response is because its parent comment was slightly careless in its phrasing. Probably just change “write” to “deploy” to capture the intended meaning.
I assure you I am not trolling. You appear to have misread my message.
Take a deep breath. Read my message one more time carefully. Notice the question mark at the end of the last sentence. Think about it. If after that you still think I’m trolling you or anyone else I will be here and happy to respond to your further questions.
