Hacker News Reader

Comment by ipaddr | Hacker News Reader

"Unlike open-source projects that are simply distributed “as-is” with no warranties, but similar to other infrastructure projects, these codebases underpin a service operated by Ruby Central, and its canonical clients, relied on by millions of developers every day to securely download and publish gems. "

Are they offering warranties?

What new privacy laws demand them signing some handcrafted legal document?

Is what they did legal?

Couldn't they fork to provide a secure version.

That one guy maintaining so many rubygems is the same guy who is offering a competing software solution that could reduce their profit stream is that the real reason?

View on HN

I did a double-take when I read that as well. I went and checked the license under rubygems, and sure enough, it's standard MIT with no warranties.

https://github.com/rubygems/rubygems/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

I'm willing to bet the people who published that have no idea what they just said, and probably don't understand what the MIT license contains.

They are talking about the rubygems.org package hosting service...

It comes with a 100,000 mile drive train warranty.

Yeah we've been meaning to talk to you about that warranty actually

What warranty does it come with?

https://rubygems.org/policies

Yep right there in the TOS:

a. THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED STRICTLY ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS, AND PROVIDER MAKES NO WARRANTY THAT THE SERVICE IS COMPLETE, SUITABLE FOR YOUR PURPOSE, RELIABLE, USEFUL, OR ACCURATE.

That’s not the only thing though. E.g. the collect PII, so I assume there are regulations to abide by etc.

They're storing PII in the github repo they kicked the core maintainers out of?

Just stop trying to make excuses for these people. They screwed up, and based on this press release, don't seem to have any interest in actually correcting those mistakes.

Right, take a look at Section 8 of the Terms of Service (https://rubygems.org/policies/terms-of-service):

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED STRICTLY ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS, AND PROVIDER MAKES NO WARRANTY THAT THE SERVICE IS COMPLETE, SUITABLE FOR YOUR PURPOSE, RELIABLE, USEFUL, OR ACCURATE.

What warranty are they providing exactly?

The license is not an accurate way to check if there is a warranty or not.

I'm not a lawyer, so maybe a silly question: is it possible the software license is different from service warranty? And I guess another thing that comes to mind is that maybe they didn't mean _legal_ warranty, but something that was used colloquially?

The MIT license is a copyright license. The developer is free to offer a warranty or any other contract they want.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com