restrictions on warranty disclaimers?

[news@boulder.colorado.edu (Dennis Heimbigner)]

In my recent announcement of the availability of the Q RPC system,
there was the following paragraph:

	WARNING:
	We are given to understand that our warranty disclaimers
	are not valid in the EC, even though we are not charging
	for this software.  Therefore, if you are a citizen of
	the EC, we must request that you do not attempt to obtain
	this software unless you have specific legal opinions stating
	that our disclaimers are acceptable.

We were prompted to include this because of a dialog
that occurred on comp.lang.ada some months ago.
The announcment then of the adamakegen program included
its warranty disclaimer.  Someone posted a message
that said that such disclaimers were void in the European Community (EC).
There was some additional discussion about applying this law
to free software.  From the discussion, it appeared to me that it
applied to all software, free or not.

My question is: did I misinterpret that discussion? In the interim
have there been messages that have clarified the issue?

-Dennis Heimbigner
 (dennis@cs.colorado.edu)