Unusable EULA’s
Slagging on software EULA’s (”end user license agreements”) goes in and out of fashion. Since I’m perpetually the third-to-last guy to hop on a bandwagon, I figured I’d at least be consistent and join this party late as well.
So let’s get right to it: software EULA’s are broken. They’re unusable. And not just for the reasons you might think. Pretty much everything about the EULA experience is horribly, horribly wrong.
Let’s start with the legalese. I’m aware of how and why legal writing has become so impenetrable and difficult to parse. (For more on this, check out this Wikipedia article.) Defenders of the language and style of legal writing point to the need to disambiguate as much as possible and cover all potential contingencies when writing law or a contract. But that argument is specious. Bloated, meandering legalese is created by lazy people who can’t be bothered to express their thoughts and intent clearly and succinctly.
Here’s an example of laziness in action (now *that’s* a contradiction in terms…) that I just encountered while attempting to install a software application I was interested in evaluating. For the curious, I was installing the open source version of SugarCRM, an application for managing customer and sales information. Let me be clear about one thing: I am NOT singling out SugarCRM for extra-special vituperation. They’re just doing what everyone else does. Their EULA experience is really no better or worse than any other vendor’s.
I started the SugarCRM install, and in one or two clicks was presented with this screen:
I don’t typically give the EULA screen more than a nanosecond of thought, but something spurred me to actually check out the license agreement. I started scrolling the text box, but quickly grew frustrated. So I put my pointer in the text box and pressed CTRL+A (”select all”) to highlight the EULA text. I planned to copy it and then drop it into a Word doc.
Surprise… the text didn’t highlight.
Now I know a usability issue when I see it. My curiosity was piqued: just how bad *was* this user experience? So I manually highlighted the EULA text on the first line, and then dragged my pointer downward. Sure enough, the text started highlighting. I figured I’d just keep my index finger down for however long it took to highlight the entire text, then try CTRL+C (”copy”).
The scrollbar indicator was taking an awfully long time to move downward. Then I noticed just how small the scrollbar indicator rectangle was… and I knew this might take a while.
After a solid 2 minutes, I had finally selected the entire block of text in SugarCRM’s EULA screen. Of course, upon pressing CTRL+C I received no indication that the text block had actually copied to the clipboard. But I took the chance, opened up Word, and pressed CTRL+V (”paste”).
When Word stopped grinding, the first thing I did was look at the page count at the bottom left of the status bar.
It said the document was SIXTY PAGES LONG.
Back in the day, I had occasionally seen Word spaz out on a page count; so I hopped to the end of the document then back to the beginning, thinking that the page count would settle down to a reasonable number.
It stayed at sixty pages.
Sixty single-spaced, twelve-point, Times New Roman, one-inch vertical by one-and-a-quarter-inch horizontal margined pages.
Guess how many words?
It has 18,284 of ‘em.
I’ve posted the EULA here so you can revel in its repulsiveness.
So let’s review: the application’s EULA is sixty pages long in Word. The text box on the EULA screen is 470 pixels wide by 135 tall (less if you subtract the gutters). And you can’t easily copy/paste the EULA into an easier-to-read format; you’re expected to read it in this tiny 470-by-135 aperture. Here’s the kicker: it’s written in dense legalese, with seemingly random switches between sentence case and upper case.
Sucks, doesn’t it?
It’s almost like they DON’T WANT you to read it. Typically, the only people who want you to agree to a legal contract without fully understanding it are slimy car salespeople and dishonest mortgage loan officers. Now I doubt that anyone at Sugar actually thinks like that; a quick perusal of their site shows that they’re committed open-sourcers who do much for the development community. In short, they seem like good people.
So why the unusable EULA? Probably the typical reasons: the developer who coded the installer forgot to enable right-click select/copy/paste in the EULA text box. And the Sugar legal team undoubtedly just concatenated the separate boilerplate licenses for the open-source components installed with SugarCRM, then added in a bit of their own liability-proofing text for good measure. In other words, they were lazy. What resulted is an unfriendly, unusable mess.
Now I was even more curious, and I wanted to do some comparative EULA-gawking. So I played around with the next two apps I had occasion to install: Windows Live Messenger and the iTunes 7.1 update.
Windows Live Messenger
Microsoft’s instant messenger app had a surprisingly readable EULA, but was a snooze-inducing 12 pages and 6,343 words long. The EULA text box was super tiny at 415 by 100 px, but it did permit both keyboard and right-click select/copy/paste.
I’ve posted the EULA here for your edification and enjoyment.
iTunes
Apple’s iTunes EULA experience was not considerably better or worse than the other two. While (relatively) brief at five pages/2,091 words, it yelled at me (i.e., was in all caps) at random times. Guess that famed Apple user experience doesn’t extend to the EULA. Here’s a screenshot showing the generous-for-this-crowd text box aperture:
The EULA itself can be found here. It too suffers from a bad case of boilerplate-itis.
Usable EULAs
This is the part of the rant where I should tell everyone how to create a better EULA experience. So without further ado…here are my recommendations for more usable EULAs:
- Content: Lose the legalese. Lawyers, say no to boilerplate. Say yes to plain language. And try your best to keep it brief. Not only will you communicate more effectively, the lay community might hate you less.
- Readability and flexibility: Display a bigger text box, provide easier ways to select/copy/paste, provide a print button, or (preferably) do all three.
And while we’re on the subject of readability… I also recommend NOT SHOUTING AT YOUR READER. PEOPLE REALLY DON’T LIKE READING IN ALL CAPS. Sentence case is much more civil, don’t you agree?
So that’s all I have today about the EULA experience. I know several other people have written about the sorry state of software EULA’s, so here’s a few links for you. And thanks for listening to my EULA kvetch.
More about EULAs at:
Boing Boing: ReasonableAgreement.org - the anti-EULA
Ben Edelman: EULAs Gone Bad
EFF: Now the Legalese Rootkit: Sony-BMG’s EULA
March 14th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Way back when, Apple used to have the most reasonable license agreements. They offered a model of simplicity, clarity, and respect for the consumer. Now it seems as if they’re in competition with Microsoft.
March 15th, 2007 at 10:42 am
Best EULA ever: An early/mid-’80s version of Turbo Pascal. The EULA was less than 2 pages long and came printed in the manual. It came with it’s own summary, which said “treat this software like a book.” How simple is that?
March 15th, 2007 at 11:45 am
I’m right with you on the EULAs. But I don’t understand why you, as someone concerned about usability, make your blog so hard to read. I.e., low contrast grey on white. My view on that practice is explained at http://www.kbh3rd.com/grey/
March 15th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Full disclosure: I am a lawyer who both writes and reads EULAs. I’m also a former software developer with a CS degree.
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.
March 15th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Here is the best EULA:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
It is designed to *guarantee* your freedom, not take it away.
March 15th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
I had a sneaking suspicion that my EULA rant would strike a chord in the tech community.
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.
March 15th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
>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: too many new license terms. It becomes so frustrating that most don’t view OSS has open at all.
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.
March 15th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
In a similar situation, I suggested to the fellow doing the EULA box that he present a radio button set or some other selection mechanism that controlled what was displayed in the text window. The default EULA that you see is the one from the software package you’re about to install, and you have the option (and perhaps the obligation) to look at all of the EULAs for each of the packages used in the development of the package, and the GPL “License” file as well. Because this was a Tcl/Tk application, and cross platform, he didn’t add a print button, but did have a button to copy the entire contents of each EULA to the paste buffer. (The EULAs were also provided as text files installed with the application.)
I don’t actually know what became of that project.
March 15th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Technically, I would expect that there is not a single EULA in that entire bunch of text. Open source licenses cannot place restrictions on the use of the software and still qualify as open source. What you have there are probably nothing but distribution licenses. You can still use the software if you don’t agree to any of the licenses but you cannot give someone else a copy of the software if you don’t agree to the licenses. However, the person who created the installer failed to make that clear and instead forced you to agree to distribution terms before you could use the software. The installer is broken, in my opinion, but not quite in the way you describe.
March 15th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
Here is the best EULA:
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
March 21st, 2007 at 12:56 am
EULA’s are designed to not be read.
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.