An interesting viewpoint from Mr Inglis
Interesting, only because he seems not to understand the existence of Open Source and its implications.
In particular, as we've seen recently, there seems to be significant amounts of abandonware in popular shareware repositories and, worse, it is linked in as required component(s) of packages supported by other, unrelated, developers. It would be nice to know if Mr Inglis even knows that this sort of linkage exists and just who, if anybody, does he think should bear the legal responsibility for fixing buggy abandonware in such a calling sequence.
Seems to me there are four main questions that need answers:
1) what responsibility should the shareware repository owner have for providing tools that allow an author to determine who wrote shareware that his code depends on?
2) Should they refuse to accept code that's not fully documented and accompanied by a properly maintained set of unit tests with enough coverage to fully validate the shareware's operation with valid, invalid and out-of-range inputs?
3) should the abandonware author be legally responsible for removing code that they've decided not to support any longer? Who inherits this responsibility if the author dies?
4) What liability should fall on a shareware author whose product depends on buggy code written by a 3rd party and that may or may not be maintained?