Can you sign an agreement indemnifying us against security problems in PuTTY?
No! A vendor of physical security products (e.g. locks) might plausibly be willing to accept financial liability for a product that failed to perform as advertised and resulted in damage (e.g. valuables being stolen). The reason they can afford to do this is because they sell a lot of units, and only a small proportion of them will fail; so they can meet their financial liability out of the income from all the rest of their sales, and still have enough left over to make a profit. Financial liability is intrinsically linked to selling your product for money. There are two reasons why PuTTY is not analogous to a physical lock in this context. One is that software products don’t exhibit random variation: if PuTTY has a security hole (which does happen, although we do our utmost to prevent it and to respond quickly when it does), every copy of PuTTY will have the same hole, so it’s likely to affect all the users at the same time. So even if our users were all paying us to use PuTTY, we wou
