A Silly Wish: EULA Summaries...

[Renegade]

I really hate LLLLLOOOOOONNNNNGGGGG EULAs. I wish that there were legislation to force EULA summaries for anything over a reasonable length. 3 or 4 pages maybe. Like who has time to read 70+ page EULAs? Nuts.

[lanux128]

EULAlyzer could go some way to ease the pain..

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• http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/eulalyzer.html

[MilesAhead]

I remember part of the consumer movement had to do with insurance policies being written in plain English.  Seems like we need something similar for licensing.  If you buy a piece of software for $15 you are obviously not going to stake an attorney $250 to explain what the license says.

But my all time favorite, I can't remember if it was an OS or another software, but it was an MS. On the outside of the shrink wrapped package in fine print, it said by opening the box you agreed to the licensing agreement that was inside.  Talk about a blank check!! Good thing it didn't say anything about first-born sons!! (Or maybe it did?)

[Cpilot]

Video-game shoppers surrender their immortal souls

On April Fool's day, the online game store Gamestation.co.uk added language to its clickthrough license that asked customers to surrender their immortal souls, though it offered a checkbox to opt out if you wanted to keep yours. 7,500 customers did not check the box.

[f0dder]

EULAs sucks, but summaries probably won't really work. When iD software released the source for the Quake 1 tools (the bsp/light/vis/quakecc, not the game engine!) I emailed them some questions, including some along the lines of "why do you need such a long eula, and couldn't you include a short summary of it?" - the reply I got back was along the lines of them not really liking the legalese, but that it was necessary - and that a summary might risk invalidating the EULA.