Posts from February 2005.

Dangerous Terms: A User's Guide to EULAs

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?

Just upgraded to WordPress 1.5

Well, just upgraded to WordPress 1.5, and decided not carry my 1.2 “theme” across for the initial upgrade, just to make sure it went smoothly. And smotthly it went, well, that’s assuming you can see this post!

Couldn’t have been simpler, backed up my database, loaded the backup into a spare database, and then followed the really simple instructions. Took less than ten minutes, and at least 7 of those were spent reading through the instructions and making sure I had a good backup. Dead easy.

Now it’ll just take me a couple of weeks to decide what to do for a new theme etc. :-)

I had a chat with the vendor.

In a previous post I mentioned that I was wondering whether I should contact the vendor of the web app that I’m writing my Desktop app to work with, I was worried about whether they would like the idea or not, whether they would think I was just taking advantage of their hard work.

Yesterday I finally plucked up the courage to send an email to the vendor. They replied within about half an hour, when I saw the reply so quick I couldn’t help thinking it might be a pretty terse response. I shouldn’t have been so worried about their reaction. Although I won’t tell you what they said as I feel that is confidential, I think I can say that they were very encouraging about the idea, and offered to help me with any problems I might have!

I can’t tell you how much of a weight off my mind it is to know that the vendor is more than happy with me writing an app to work with theirs. I really should have known better, the guys at Fog Creek are great, always very helpful, and very pragmatic. Just what you’d expect from the company run by Joel Spolsky.

Yes, you read it right, I’ve let slip what I’m actually doing, don’t faint! :-) I’ve decided that I’ve really got no reason to keep secret what I’m developing, and as my good friend Gordon pointed out in his comment to my “The Big Think – Part 3” post, I may even get some feedback from the user community. And as I’ve said before, feedback is King.

Went to my first EDLUG meeting.

Went to my first Edinburgh Linux User Group meeting on Thursday night, well worth going to.

I’ve been a bit of a lurker on the mailing list for while, and always meant to go to one of their meetings; it took a chance mail to the group from a fellow Informix user to spur me to go.

Not much more to say really, just that it was well worth the trip over the Edinburgh on the bus to have a few pints with some fellow Linux users, a nice relaxed evening, good to put a few faces to names. I’ll be going again.