Edited by author 09-08-2002 11:23 AM
Terry Frazier has brought up an interesting point regarding the LSLA, specifically what risks do
I incur if I enforce auto-updates on users and something goes wrong?
Obviously it is not in my interests for anything to go horribly wrong as I don't want to upset users however inevitably if a thing can go wrong at some point it will.
In the first place I will have the warranty disclaimer protection. The risk a user incurs with auto-update is not really any greater since, in theory, an update could be defective whether it was installed automatically or manually. It's not clear to me that auto-update increases my risk.
Secondly if something is going badly wrong then this is a good way of catching it quickly. This is part of the service that the users provide in return for the software.
However as I said before I'm not looking to put anyone's data at risk. So how can we avoid that situation?
- Auto-updates don't necessary get *every* change. It may be that user's only automatically get version upgrades and not alpha/beta releases.
- Auto-updates should make good backups.
- Provide a failsafe rollback mechanism
Thoughts?
