[lug] Proprietary Licenses Are Even Worse Than They Look

[davide]

FYI,
;Dav

Sent to you by davide via Google Reader: Proprietary Licenses Are Even
Worse Than They Look via Bradley M. Kuhn's Blog ( bkuhn ) by
bkuhn at ebb.org (Bradley M. Kuhn) on 4/7/10

There are lots of evil things that proprietary software companies might
do. Companies put their own profit above the rights and freedoms of
their users, and to that end, much can be done that subjugates users.
Even as someone who avoids proprietary software, I still read many
proprietary license agreements (mainly to see how bad they are). I've
certainly become numb to the constant barrage of horrible restrictions
they place on users. But, sometimes, proprietary licenses go so far
that I'm taken aback by their gratuitous cruelty.

Apple's licenses are probably the easiest example of proprietary
licensing terms that are well beyond reasonableness. Of course, Apple's
licenses do the usual things like forbidding users from copying,
modifying, sharing, and reverse engineering the software. But even
worse, Apple also forbid users from running Apple software on any
hardware that is not produced by Apple.

The decoupling of one's hardware vendor from one's software vendor was
a great innovation brought about by the PC revolution, in which,
ironically, Apple played a role. Computing history has shown us that
when your software vendor also controls your hardware, you can easily
be “locked in“ in ways that make mundane proprietary software licenses
seem almost nonthreatening.

Indeed, Apple has such a good hype machine that they even have
convinced some users this restrictive policy makes computing better. In
this worldview, the paternalistic vendor will use its proprietary
controls over as many pieces of the technology as possible to keep the
infantile users from doing something that's “just bad for them”. The
tyrannical MCP of Tron comes quickly to my mind.

I'm amazed that so many otherwise Free Software supporters are quite
happy using OSX and buying Apple products, given these kinds of utterly
unacceptable policies. The scariest part, though, is that this practice
isn't confined to Apple. I've been recently reminded that other
companies, such as IBM, do exactly the same thing. As a Free Software
advocate, I'm critical of any company that uses their control of a
proprietary software license to demand that users run that software
only on the original company's hardware as well. The production and
distribution of mundane proprietary software is bad enough. It's
unfortunate that companies like Apple and IBM are going the extra mile
to treat users even worse.

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