Any particular licence and state / country in mind? Because there is a myriad combinations, answer for some homebrew licence in California will be totally different than the answer for BSD licence in India.

Added. MIT License and New York (or if there is any overarching federal precedent or statute on the issue when dealing with free to use software, though I doubt that there is).

You also need to consider what the damage caused is and if it is something that the user brought on themselves or not.

"Bugged" is usually understood to mean "deliberately containing covert surveillance devices". You probably mean "buggy".

I live in Illinois. I could've quoted you the as is passage from memory. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_law - Every thing is as is, and every employee is at will. Basically everyone and everything can be told to 'go fly a kite' at any time.

Suing freeware authors is generally a questionable idea even if the suit is viable, they almost always are either hobbyists with no money to speak of or very big corporations with lots of very skilled lawyers who can easily bury you in years of legal proceedings.

You can probably sue and get your money back.

We have a saying in the software industry, "Free software is worth every penny."

WHY ? WHY would you sue other people for damages you inflicted yourself with software you just downloaded from the internet ?

There are TONS! of free and open source projects supported by big tech companies and many professional coders do FOS projects as part of there jobs. I would go on to say you would be hard pressed to find any big tech company who is not involved in the FOS movement to some degree.

Yeah. Some freeware is OS, some isn't, and vise versa.

@AustinHemmelgarn there is also the general consensus that to make litigation outside small claims court worth the money and effort you must be suing for at least 200K worth of damages. I struggle to see how random programs found on the internet can lead to that.

It would help if OP also mentioned what kind of damages happened.

This sounds about as legitimate as a store owner suing a random band because they downloaded a song (from somewhere it was offered for free), played it in the store and it put customers in a bad mood so they left. Either don't use it or hire someone to do it better if you expect accountability.

@RBarryYoung and yet your job relies on oodles of it.

@RBarryYoung Linux, git, Apache, MySQL, Python, PHP, gcc, clang, Firefox, Chrome, VLC.

I sure hope this is just a hypothetical case and you're not actually thinking of trying this.

@RonJohn Actually, that is not true at all. You're making too many generalizations and assumptions and some of them are not true which is invalidating your unsupported claim.

@iPherian You seem to be under the assumption that I said that free software cannot be worth more than you paid for it, but that is not what I said. I am well aware that there are many examples of free software that are worth more than you paid for it. The point of my statement in this context was that the fact that you didn't pay anything for it (or actually buy it) limited your options for suing.

Also, if it's open source, there may be more than one person responsible, maybe 10s, 100s, or over thousands. Who would be liable in this case? (note: I realize the question is about "freeware", not "open source", but the MIT license is an open source license)

@RBarryYoung you sir seem like a proprietary purist