More on Patches & EULAs
In a comment below, Nudecybot mentions Mark Rasch’s “You Need A Cyber-Lawyer” article in Wired News. I don’t buy this line of reasoning. Making a decent auto-lawyer requires being able to parse legalese, which is a hard problem. Now, legalese is a subset of English, so you might think that the weather parsers, or similar tools, could do a decent job of it. But the adversarial nature of legal documents makes this hard. I’d much prefer “The Pure Software Act of 2006,” which is Simson Garfinkel’s take on the same problem.
The thing is, once you translate the legalese, you will realise that 99.9% of EULAs are:
a) really contradictory to your best interests
b) unenforceable
What we need is a BugMeNot/Adblocker extension to the OS that somehow get around those pesky things 🙂
Or just don’t install anything that doesn’t have a nice OSS license.