microISV.com has pointed out indirectly that Annalee Newitz has written a very interesting white paper as a “A User’s Guide to EULAs”, with Donna Wentworth commenting on some excerpts. If you have ever scanned through a End User License Agreement (who actually ever reads them properly) and just clicked “Accept” to get past that load of legalese without a second thought, you might like to reconsider this approach in the future. There’s some really scary stuff in some of the examples, in some cases you can’t even share your opinions about a product publicly once you’ve accepted the license. In the case of a Beta program you can be quite happy about this, it’s understandable that the company doesn’t want their unreleased software talked about, but this is fully released software we’re talking about.
Number 6 on the list of nasty clauses is the ubiquitous “We are not responsible if this product messes up your computer.”, and this is basically the only clause that I’ve thought about including in my EULA. Here’s what my EULA was going to be before reading these two posts:
Terms Of Sale And License
*IMPORTANT* Please read the below carefully *IMPORTANT*IMiJ Ltd grants one person per user license purchased the use of this software on one or more personal computers.
Every effort has been made to make this a quality and feature rich application for you to enjoy. However, you install and use this software at your own risk and indemnify IMiJ Ltd against any claims should installation or usage of this software result in loss or damage of any kind. If you do not accept the terms of this license please do not install or use this software.
This software is covered by a 90 day no questions asked money back guarantee. If you wish to surrender your license, please contact IMiJ Ltd at customer-service@imij.co.uk with details of your order number and serial number and we will refund your money and disable the serial number as soon as possible.
What do you think, is this a fair license? I tried to make it as simple as possible, clear and to the point, but after reading the linked articles, I might end up saying something like this:
Terms Of Sale And License
*IMPORTANT* Please read the below carefully *IMPORTANT*IMiJ Ltd grants one person per user license purchased the use of this software on one or more personal computers.
Every effort has been made to make this a quality and feature rich application for you to enjoy, if it does something that you didn’t expect or don’t want, please don’t take me to court! Be excellent to one and other!
This software is covered by a 90 day no questions asked money back guarantee. If you wish to surrender your license, please contact IMiJ Ltd at customer-service@imij.co.uk with details of your order number and serial number and we will refund your money and disable the serial number as soon as possible.
What do you think, an improvement?
