It's much worse than that

Posted Nov 14, 2007 3:30 UTC (Wed) by sepreece (guest, #19270)
In reply to: It's much worse than that by robilad
Parent article: Google Calling: Inside Android, the gPhone SDK (O'ReillyNet)

"Google reserves the right to revoke" 

Again, I think you're jumping to the worst-possible interpretation of this clause. I read that
as lawyers saying "This is a pre-release thing. It's possible we'll decide not to create a
real product based on it, if it turns out not to be economically viable. If so, you can't sue
us for any money you might have spent developing products on it."

I don't think you can read much of anything into the terms of a preview release - they're
giving you a chance to play with it and comment on it, but it's not the product, it's not even
a product, and it's not unreasonable that the terms covering the preview release would be
tailored to the fact that it's not a product.

[NOTE: I have no connection to Google and no specific insight into their motivation, though I
do have a tendency to assume the best about people and corporations until proven otherwise...]

It's much worse than that

Posted Nov 14, 2007 14:39 UTC (Wed) by robilad (guest, #27163) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not a regular clause in EULAs. It's not there by come copy-paste mistake by Google's
lawyers. It has been deliberately crafted, weighed, and put in there to give Google exclusive
control over 'open' platform.

You don't introduce a gun in the first act, if you don't intend to use it in the third. If
Google intended to play fair, it wouldn't need such terms.

It's much worse than that

Posted Nov 14, 2007 17:41 UTC (Wed) by sepreece (guest, #19270) [Link]

Again, it's a pre-release, explicitly under different license terms than the eventual SDK and
platform. This particular clause appears to be specific to the pre-release; my own guess would
be that it won't be in the eventual license, but my guess has no more significance than anyone
elses...

It's much worse than that

Posted Nov 15, 2007 3:00 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Actually lawyers do introduce 'guns in the first act without using them in the third act' the
time.. its one of the problems with real life versus fiction.