Open Source
Some people have taken me to task for being unkind to altruistic Open Source Software (OSS) developers providing free software in their spare time - as I'm apparently expecting them to provide a "fitness for purpose" warranty too.
Well, no, I'm not. And there's a comment in here as to why the CDDL might have that disclaimer (although I'm still not happy with it). However, although my primary target was conventional vendor software - I would include also any OSS used in a commercial business.
I should have made it clear that if you take on OSS for free and don't take on a support contract, you can hardly expect a "fitness for purpose" warranty - sorry.
But, then, you probably shouldn't use software like that in any sort of business critical systems where you'd need to invoke a "fitness for purpose" warranty - unless you accept the whole risk of supporting the software in-house, which avoids the issue.
If you pay for support for industrial strength OSS like JBoss, I still think that you should expect it to be "fit for purpose". Of course, defining what "fit for purpose" means in detail won't be trivial, but I'm sure that software companies could cope....