The Mozilla Blog announces that they’re canning the EULA for Firefox! In a time where corporations take great precaution to avoid litigation and people are increasingly litigious, one less EULA is a Big Thing and a step in the right direction. Go Mozilla!
Virtually all software EULAs are designed to exempt its creators and distributors from responsibility should anything go awry. Although it’s it a bit strange when you’ve paid a lot of money to use a piece of software, it seems to be the general opinion that the makers of open source and free software neither should nor could offer legally binding warranties towards the stability of their product.
In my opinion, the most interesting aspect of EULAs or Software License Agreements are that they’re so arbitrary. And that in most legal systems, one sided agreements such as these, have to be reasonable. That means you can’t just put any silly old thing in there and expect to it to fly.
One example of this is the Pirate Bay. A few weeks ago there was a fair amount of fuss about a report from published by Svenska Förläggareföreningen, purveying the proliferation of audio book and e-book torrents [Swedish] via the Pirate Bay. Their report wasn’t the source of the fuss, but rather the fact the Pirate Bay was accusing them of violating it’s EULA (which states that companies are not allowed to use the site)! It was all over pretty quickly because it was a passive EULA that visitors didn’t have to approve.
In my opinion it was a tremendously silly move. The Pirate Bay should of course stick to arguing their case of Information Wants to be Free (or whatever) instead of resorting to the same dirty methods as Big Content…
I digress. All I really wanted to do was give a big hand to the Mozilla Foundation for getting rid of the Firefox EULA and to Ubuntu for forcing their hand!
Tags: EULA, Open Source, Software
