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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.
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When has any product ever "lived" up to the marketing claims? If I expected everything I bought to live up to their claims, I'd be dissapointed with every bar of soap, every beer, and every Big Mac.
If I could have manufacturer's adopt one part of the consumers bill of rights, it would be to advertise with honesty. Do not sell me a software product which does not live up the advertising.
The one part I disagree with is the reverse engineering. Companies have a right to sell software and to ban people from reverse engineering it.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
It would be like if I purchased a VCR which did not work two months later, and after I went to have it fixed, the manufacturer decided to "add a feature" which sends them data about the VCR. It is BS.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
some strong feelings to hold companies fully accountable for losses caused by their products' defects
I can see where this view is coming from, but seriously; the litigious culture that is developing in the USA (and therefore no doubt on this side of the pond before long) could have a grave impact on your economy.
You have to take a certain degree of responsibility for your own action. Otherwise, everybody will just be too scared to do anything, and every American will just stay in bed all day.
You NEED suppliers to be a viable business yourself; and in return those suppliers deserve a leniency from you as far as accountability goes.
In return you get leniency from your customers as far as your own liability goes.
As the owner of a small software business, I feel comfortable with the fact that whilst I cannot sue Microsoft's ass if something goes terribly wrong; neither can my customers sue my ass.
Swings and roundabout; 6 of one...
This is beautiful. Make it clearer, though, that we're talking about use licenses/single purchase licenses, not source code copy licenses such as the GPL. You need to very clearly define what kinds of purchases this bill of rights applies to, or software manufacturers will wierdly try to define their products so they fall outside the bill of rights' scope.
I wonder what would happen if 40,000 slashdotters mailed a copy of this to their respective congressferrets?
The only thing I would add is to see if there's any reasonable way something can be done about the fact the BSA has made it a criminal act to own lots of software and have less than perfect archiving of license paperwork.. I don't think there's any way that could be done in a reasonable manner within this "bill of rights" though...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
What you need is some sort of consumers' organization -- some sort of Ralph Nader type thing. There is a limit as to what one screwball can do, but a whole organization full of screwballs, all making noise ... even Microsoft would have to pay attention.
Is there such a thing as a Software Consumers' Association? I couldn't find anything like that using a quick Google search.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Y'know, I was just thinking this exact same thing on Friday - that the software industry is having a serious identity crisis at present. They can't figure out what products they're selling, and how they're doing it. They're mostly driven by the profit motive: How can we generate more profit? Which is great if the answer is, "build a better product" - but crap if the answer is compulsory upgrades, limited-time licenses, or license audits.
But there's a big one missing, particularly important in light of Symantec's foolhardy announcement:
The software can be installed on multiple machines.
I own a notebook and a desktop home server. I use both of them basically as a unit - sometimes literally, via Terminal Services or Synergy. They achieve different purposes - the server provides infrastructure (holding data, managing requests from other users [e.g., web pages], network security, MP3s), while I run actual applications on my notebook.
With this setup, it only makes sense to have a roughly identical set of software on each. I don't want my word processing solely on my notebook, and I don't want all of my security apps solely on my server.
So it's exactly that reason why this product-activation crap is odious. If I want two functionally-identical machines, I have to buy two operating systems, two word-processing packages, two versions of TurboTax and Symantec. similarly, with DRM, I'll have to buy two licenses for every piece of media I want to play. Others will follow down this path to the seedy underworld of profit-driven software.
It only seems fair that I expect to pay only once per software package. After all, I'm one guy; I'm never typing on both machines at the same time. Now, I understand why software companies are reluctant to release software that can be installed a trillion times, because it tends to get purchased, like, eight times, and then widely distributed on IRC. But at the same time, they're smacking down guys like me.
So with that in mind, I propose: Let software be installed on multiple machines. That number can be limited, and it can be small. Ten is fine - if I install software on more than ten machines, I should probably be purchasing a site license. But one is insufficient, in this day of frequent multiple-computer ownership.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
I sometimes long for the 80s. Sure I might wait years for a software release, but with a few exceptions, it always worked. And it usually worked as advertised. I miss products like WordPerfect 5, it worked right out of the box. And if I had a problem I could call someone and actually get help, as opposed to a prepared statement.
So I feel it needs another article:
11. A software vendor will provide real support for the products they sell. Or A software vendor will outline in detail what; if any, support they provide and what guidelines they use.
A bill of software rights may or may not make headway. However, it would seem to me that a consumer protection label could work, since the model has been applied successfully in other industries. What I envision is some kind of up-front, package labelling like the following:
Caution! By agreeing to use this software, the vendor may access your private files at any time.
Caution! This software is unprotected and may expose you to foriegn programs (virus and worms) that may corrupt your documents.
The benefit to consumers, of course, is that no software manufacture would want to have these labels applied to their software.
Any attempt to form a "Software Consumer's Organization" will have a BSA bullseye painted on it in a heartbeat. It would be far more exciting to see the Alliance Against Fraud in Telemarketing and Electronic Commerce (AAFTEC) decide that current software licensing practices are deceptive, fraudulent and unfair to consumers.
There is no Software Consumers' Association, but I have worked with lawyers from Ralph Nader's Consumer Project on Technology and from Consumers Union on software contract law.
When public anger with an industry rises, legislators get tempted to create laws to regulate the industry. Software publishing is particularly vulnerable because so many publishers have engaged in business practices that would be considered outrageous (and unlawful) in traditional markets AND because this is no longer a wildly expanding industry / employer in the United States.
We can lay out some principles to advise those legislators, or we can lay back, and later complain that they got it all wrong.
Cem Kaner, Professor of Software Engineering, Florida Institute of Technology
The Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) movement seems to understand this, but many mass-market proprietary software developers are still able to flout this rule. Unfortunately, most computer users have become accustomed to being subservient to their software.
My own experience with most FLOSS has been much like my experience with high-speed Internet service: I can never go back. I think once people get a good taste of what using well-behaved software is like, things will quickly change. The only things that can get in the way of this change are: