The EFF guide to EULAs

Posted Feb 18, 2005 19:24 UTC (Fri) by Ross (guest, #4065)
In reply to: The EFF guide to EULAs by southey
Parent article: The EFF guide to EULAs

Also: What about software you install at work, or for a friend on their own
computer?

The EFF guide to EULAs

Posted Feb 20, 2005 5:54 UTC (Sun) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

My employer had a vendor's application engineers come by the other month
(if you're seriously considering paying six figures for software, they'll
not only send over a team of people to help you evaluate it, but they pay
for lunch too ;-).

We showed the vendor's guys to one of our computers we had set up for
them, and they ran through all of the software installation...except that
we were asked to step in each time to click on the "I Agree" buttons for
each of the dozen or so separately licensed modules.

So whoever "I" is, it's absolutely not the vendor or the vendor's
technical or sales staff, not even if our people say "yes, we agree, just
click the damn button so we can all go to lunch!" in front of a half-dozen
witnesses on both sides of the client-vendor divide. I think they expect
that if things end up in court, they'll be dusting the mouse for
fingerprints or something.

Normally an agreement binding on the corporation must be made by an
officer of the company, but I don't see many executives following IT
people around to kick on "I agree" buttons. It might be valid to review
each EULA once, then delegate the actual agreement-clicking to IT for all
future installs of the same software version...but I doubt that many IT
people forward EULA texts to their superiors for review either.

Incidentally, I tried a short quiz experiment...none of the vendor's own
staff knows what's in their own EULA either.