License Agreement from Hell…
Tim Boudreau’s Blog: When engineers (sort-of) read licenses - a cautionary tale, July 29, 2005.
Every day, it seems, libraries and librarians have to agree to another license to use information or software. These are typically long documents filled with complicated legal jargon. It is not always easy to know exactly what you are agreeing to.
Here are excerpts from
Tim Boudreau’s recent experience…
Did I scroll down and go through the whole thing with a fine toothed comb? Nope. Neither did anybody else - that’s the cautionary part of this tale….
… the document is written so perfectly backwards for an open source site that it’s almost impossible to tell that. It definitely means I should be careful what I wish for. Correct doesn’t necessarily mean human-readable….
…For the missing piece of the puzzle, you have to scroll way down to section 6…
So, here it is in a nutshell: When you download NetBeans, you click through a license. That license says “This license covers everything except the parts that are covered by open source licenses.” Which, in this case, happens to be…all of NetBeans. For a lawyer, it is perfectly clear because it says it doesn’t supercede the open source stuff - how could anyone read it and not figure that out?
For an engineer downloading software, the first thing you look for isn’t what the license says it doesn’t cover - and probably nobody expects a license agreement to say “This agreement doesn’t apply to a bunch of stuff, and by the way, one of the things it doesn’t apply to is the product you’re downloading.”