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Notice: GeekPress is back up and running, thanks to Paul! It's still a not-so-serious tech news blog, but the format is significantly looser. Diana, having given up programming for philosophy, has her own philosophical blog NoodleFood. More of her work can be found at DianaHsieh.com.

 

Confessions of a software liar

10:26:35 am mst / 13 February 2001 found by paul / filed in software / source Techweb 223 hits / 2 comments / 0 e-mails

The author describes how software licensing agreements give users powerful incentives to fib, essentially turning honest people into liars.

Diana has long been irritated at what she describes as these "contracts of adhesion".

Comments

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not quite by diana 12:07:29 pm mst / 15 February 2001 / # 2

Paul misspoke -- sort of. What irritates me are contracts (particularly contracts of adhesion) in which the other party has no intention of enfocing certain provisions. Such provisions are included so that they can be called upon when someone does *something else* that they do not like, particularly something that they did not expect. For example, my contract with Road Runner, my former cable modem provider, said that I was absolutely not allowed to run a server off my cable modem. But the company knew and had no objection to my using a Linux box as a gateway machine, even though it was technically a server. What the "no servers" provision of the contract wanted to prohibit was people using their cable modem connection in order to serve web or ftp sites that would suck up lots of traffic. The contract prohibited more than it needed to, so that Road Runner could bounce bandwidth-sucking users on the grounds that they had a server, rather than on the grounds that they were sucking up bandwidth. Such contracts are frequently overly broad because there are no incentives to make them actually prohibit only the things that the contracting company needs to prohibit. Consequently, companies exclude all manner of things that are just fine, thereby giving otherwise reasonable people a reason to lie about their activities so that they are not in violation of the contract. The danger to the company is that once people see it as okay to lie to the company about X, they are more likely to lie in cases where it does actually matter. Contracts of adhesion make this situation all the more difficult, as it is more or less impossible to negotitate more reasonable terms or get legitimate permission to violate those terms. Hence, the incentive to lie is greater. So that's what bugs me about contracts of adhesion.

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what's wrong with contracts of adhesion? by MysteriousStranger 11:33:46 am mst / 13 February 2001 / # 1

What is wrong with contracts of adhesion? Saying "take it or leave it" seems like a perfectly appropriate position for anybody to take during a business deal. That being said I agree that the EULAs are a pain in the ass. I never read them either. It would be useful to have a standard commercial license, something like the GPL but for proprietary software, so users could actually read it once and understand what they were agreeing to thereafter. But I am not sure the writers of EULAs want the users to understand what they are agreeing to . . .