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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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But then IE crashed.
Just kidding! I'd never use IE.
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.
You must not have seen the herbal essence commercials then.
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!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I went to read this article thinking I would probably end up posting and saying that the US is too litigous, that it's dumb to have agreement upon agreement, even on the side of good, and that it was probably just a bunch of whiny rights.
What I found, though, was a simple, precise set of terms that are wholly agreeable. Nothing in that document is the least bit complicated or overbroad.
Let us see the contracts before we have to agree to them. Don't take away rights we already have, like criticism and reverse engineering, and first sale. If you know about serious bugs, tell us. Don't lie about what the product does.
That's pretty straightforward, and should not be the least bit damaging to anyone selling decent software.
This is also the America where consumers can ignore all of the information pummelled into them, make poor consumer choices, but then amazingly they can turn around and profess a child-like ignorance, actually suing because they should be protected from their own poor judgement.
Quality and security of software is a market feature, and if the public ignores the continual security lapses of some particularly popular software, for instance, and if they accept that there will be X crashes per week, then so be it: The marketplace has spoken. We don't need anyone protecting us from ourselves, and feigning ignorance after the fact is incredibly weak.
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