History of "No Warranty" clauses in software

Question

Almost all free/open source software licenses include a section disclaiming any warranty or liability. This is not new; A 1985 licence for GNU Emacs includes the following:

GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty. No author or distributor accepts responsibility to anyone for the consequences of using it or for whether it serves any particular purpose or works at all, unless he says so in writing.

It seems that the writers of early software licenses were aware that distributing software risked being construed as providing a warranty. Were there any notable cases in which a software distributor was sued for providing an implied warranty? Is similar phrasing used in other fields that software licenses would have borrowed this style of phrasing from? What is the broader pre-1985 historical context surrounding the "No Warranty" clause in software licenses?

Answer 1

The concept of an implied warranty was one of the core features of Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code ("UCC"), governing the sale of goods, that was first approved for adoption by individual states in 1951, and was adopted by almost every state in the decade or so that followed. The UCC was innovative in the prominent role it gave to express and implied warranties relative to the Uniform Sales Act of 1906 from which it was adapted.

Early software writers were well aware that these concepts from the Uniform Commercial Code might be extended, as part of the common law, to contracts for the sale of software (which is outside the scope of Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code because it is not within the definition of a "good"). So, the sought to disclaim this liability at the outset.

In a related development, in the 1960s and 1970s, the period immediately leading up to first examples of mass marketed software, the common law of product liability, even in the absence of express or implied warranties, was rapidly become far more expansive.