Duh.

Exactly like the surgeon generals warning on a box of cigarettes – they break every convention of good design to create a design that lends itself to not being read.

Uppercase text (proven more difficult to read than mixed case), aggravated white space (due to outer border, etc.

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

It is designed to *guarantee* your freedom, not take it away.

GPL is not an EULA, it’s a distribution license. It specifically states you don’t need to accept it to run the GPL program. I actually filed a bug against FileZilla because it required me to accept the GPL, when the GPL had no such requirement

Actually, that confuses me; only the old BSD licence requires crediting the licence and/or licensors in your software EULA. Generally, if you’re using OSS, as long as the licence YOU use is GPL-compliant, you don’t have to run down the full GPL/LGPL/BSD/MIT/whatever licence yourself.

The exceptions, IIRC, are the Apache licence and as I mentioned before, the old BSD licence. But IANAL…

Also, I figured I’d mention, after working with Visual Studio, I noticed that Microsoft’s default install generator generates the licence boxes mentioned above; so actually, odds are the LAWYER is generating the licence agreement box and that’s why it’s so horrible in terms of usability.

I don’t actually know what became of that project.

Just by glancing at the first EULA, the reason for the problem becomes very obvious: open source license agreements: apache, php, mysql, mod_dav, python (which includes software history, etc), libiconv, various GNU licenses, etc. All of which have different terms. All of which have their own notice requirements. All of which the developer/lawyer didn’t want to read. It also illustrates one of the reasons many corporations and their ill-informed attorneys fear or become frustrated by OSS: to many new license terms. It becomes so frustrating that most don’t view OSS has open at all.

However, I can honestly say that the way that this is played out though is problematic on so many levels. It illustrates what happens when non-lawyers get involved with legal terms. Obviously no lawyer stopped to think about how to make the license agreement internally consistent. Of course, that would be expensive and add costs. Instead, (I would guess) the developers attempted to address was to make sure that each of the various OSS elements is subject to the correct license terms…voila, instant mess. IN addition, I would bet that the developers don’t even understand their own rights under this agreement.

Now good license agreements need not be very long. Truth be told, though, most licenses won’t be short for lots of reasons. Not the least of which is that developers/licensors don’t want to be sued for how the end users use their software, and, therefore, it’s in their best interest to make very clear the relationship and the assumption of risk. In addition, most agreements reflect many years of experience with people abusing loopholes.

I’d give the name of my firm, but that’s just tacky.

P.S. the Pascal license described above (the one in the manual) is probably not enforceable. Arguably, notice of the terms would come too late. A person could have installed, run and used the software for a very long time before becoming alerted to the fact that there were terms at all.

Thanks to the commenters above (and hopefully, below) for the contributions.

I should stop now, or else my head won’t fit through the door.

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

It is designed to *guarantee* your freedom, not take it away.