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Borland Kylix/JBuilder License Reviewed
DJFelix writes: "I'm probably the billionth person to submit this story, but T.J. Duchene has posted a horrifying review of Borland's license for Kylix and JBuilder 5. The license requires giving Borland the right to enter your property, search your systems and records for license compliance. The license also requires the waiving of a jury trial by all parties for all suits including class action suits. This type of gestapo licensing will not be accepted by even the most hardcore anti open-source companies. Send an e-mail to pr@borland.com to voice your concern."
...that this license agreement will be changed within the next week. Companies always think they can slip crap like this in, but as soon as people start catching on it goes right out the window. When will they learn that there actually are a few people that do read the EULA?
Could you just imagine...
"By opening this box of Raisin Bran(tm), you agree to allow Kellog's Corp. to enter your home or place of business to conduct searches to ensure that said cereal is being consumed in a lawful fashion.
Additionally, should any harm to your physical person result from consuming Raisin Bran(tm) (for instance, but not limited to, consumption of a Jagged Metal Krusto-O (tm)), you agree to waive any right to legal recourse."
Don't like it? Stop eating pre-packaged food.
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
That will not happen. I will not recommend Kylix knowing what I now know about Borland's voyeristic business practices. Can you imagine this: One day I get a call from the Borland Gestapo informing me that they will be at the office at 3PM to conduct an audit. I then have to tell my boss, and his boss, that a company that they've never heard of will be demanding access to our private, mission-critical computer systems. And due to incompetent boobery on my part we are required to assist them. I would be fired, and I would deserve it.
No thanks, Source Navigator * (gcc + peace of mind) is working out nicely.
This is not the first time that Borland has come out with a licence with incredibly objectionable terms.
A number of years ago, the licence for their C compiler had the provision that you could not use it to create a competing product. (It would probably make compiling GCC a violation of the license agreement.) They backed off after people screamed about it.
It makes me wonder if their lawyers are paid under the table by Microsoft or some other competitor. Why else would they put in clauses that are so obvious to piss off their customers time and again?
"Trademarks are the heraldry of the new feudalism."
The irony is that the "money is power" issue you bemoan so much is in large part a result of driving a lot of freedoms to an absurd conclusion. Amassing fortunes running in the billions of dollars may seem like an "inalianable right", the right to property, but if you allow that to happen, everybody else's freedoms and rights get limited and the market stops working.
If you live with other people, you have to make compromises and give up some freedoms. The compromise we should make is to limit the size of corporations, ensure that each market has many players in it, to regulate markets and behavior tightly so that companies behave responsibly, and to reduce the disparity between the wealthy and the poor via taxation and social policies. Conservative economists are right when they say that that will lower the GDP, income, competitiveness, and monetary wealth of the nation. They are wrong when they say that that's a bad thing. A nation in which a few percent of the population have 50% of the wealth may be just as good to an economist as a nation in which the wealth is more evenly distributed, but it isn't as good for the people. And our current laissez faire policies lead to the former kind of nation, not the latter.
Sending a letter to their PR department takes very little time, and to those who suggest that we allow the market to correct the deficiencies and dementia in their licensing agreement -- public outcry would be counted amongst the forces that can influence the market.
It took me about 60 seconds to type up a very brief e-mail:
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Greetings,
Your new licensing scheme for Kylix and JBuilder 5 has ensured that I will strongly recommend against that software under that license being used by my company, and furthermore will pass the word via the mailing lists and discussion groups to which I belong in order to ensure that nobody is duped into purchasing it without reading the licensing agreement.
I would suggest that you consider a change, as draconian tactics do little more than alienate your potential markets and detract from your present ones.
Your products are doubtless one of the reasons that I learned my profession, and I find this to be on a personal level quite a disappointment.
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It certainly can't hurt anyone to send something similar. This is a benefit/neutral scenario, unless 1.5 minutes of your time counts as a detraction.
I would rather have Borland realize their error and seek to correct -- perhaps start by replacing their legal consultation team -- immediately, rather than wait until their quarterly earnings dictate that they ought to alter something.
-l
I strongly suspect the difficulty here is that Borland just planted the damn thing in Kylix Open Edition without thinking.
Very stupid - and a shame. I'm a registered owner of the commercial server/developer edition of Kylix, and I've been following it closely since the official launch at last February's Linuxworldexpo. I don't see this as an attempt by Borland to deliberately engage in legal tactics to subvert the GPL, which they respect. Somebody screwed up.
It's profoundly ironic that Borland had the bad luck to make this kind of error in a product developed for the Linux community, for whom opensource licensing and the GPL are serious matters indeed.
If Borland were smart they would rectify the licensing situation and post an announcement here. Kylix took literally years to code, and it would be a shame if the bad feeling incited by this kind of PR fiasco put off large numbers of developers otherwise open to working with the product, which is a truly thoughtful and careful port of Delphi.
give me a
You may have purchased a copy of the software, but you have not purchased the right to use that copy. See, to use it, you generally have to copy it to your hard disk, and copyright gives exclusive rights over reproduction (not just distribution to a third party) to the copyright holder. In exchange for them granting the right to install, you have to submit to the licence conditions.
Insane? Absolutely. What we need is copyright that only grants exclusive rights to distribute copies, not to make copies generally. It's a lot more sensible, since it protects only what copyright was originally intended to protect, and it would render these stupid EULAs void for a failure of consideration (i.e. the copyright holder isn't giving you any rights you don't already have, so they can't demand that you submit to draconian licence terms in exchange for nothing in return).