Feb 24 2005
You DO Read Software License Agreements, Don’t You?
It Pays To Read License Agreements:
You didn’t really read the EULA. How do I know? Because hardly anyone does. To prove that point, PC Pitstop included a clause in one of its own EULAs that promised anyone who read it, a “consideration” including money if they sent a note to an email address listed in the EULA. After four months and more than 3,000 downloads, one person finally wrote in. That person, by the way, got a check for $1,000 proving, at least for one person, that it really does pay to read EULAs.
Nice try; I’m still not going to read them. Some software companies, I think, intentionally make their license agreements so long to bore the reader before they get to the part where they agree to give their soul to the devil.
And then there’s the classic story of Dell’s Software License Policy.
That’s interesting, in the way that it severely pisses me off. I hate that they think I should be bound by this agreement. Like, I’m typing into my own hardware and using the machine language that you have created for me that I paid for, why should YOU have the right to control MY behavior? Screw you corporate milky way!
I like how teams that pirate software sometimes blank out the EULA, all that is displayed is a big blank screen that you press OK or cancel on. Who would object to nothingness? Creationists, that’s who. I don’t know about pir8ing first hand, I read about it, or something.