Software Customer Bill of Rights

Cem Kaner of Badsoftware.com has written up a Software Customer Bill of Rights. Very appropriate considering our recent stories about Microsoft viruses, Dell's BIOS-clickwrap licensing agreement, etc.

Comments

Just the 10 basic facts

[RobertB-DC]

Just for reference, for those who don't have time to R the FA, here are the ten items listed in the Bill of Rights, without the explanation.

(Note, this does not excuse you from reading the FA, there will be a test.)

Software Customer Bill of Rights

1. Let the customer see the contract before the sale.

2. Disclose known defects.

3. The product (or information service) must live up to the manufacturer's and seller's claims.

4. User has right to see and approve all transfers of information from her computer.

5. A software vendor may not block customer from accessing his own data without court approval.

6. A software vendor may not prematurely terminate a license without court approval.

7. Mass-market customers may criticize products, publish benchmark study results, and make fair use of a product.

8. The user may reverse engineer the software.

9. Mass-market software should be transferrable.

10. When software is embedded in a product, the law governing the product should govern the software.

Bonus points if you can figure out which of the above *didn't* have a detailed explanation in the original!