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From: jpm@BNL44.ARPA (John McNamee)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: Software License Bill - California
Message-ID: <10723@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 15-May-85 21:44:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.10723
Posted: Wed May 15 21:44:45 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 17-May-85 02:47:28 EDT
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
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>But will software producers make use of these restrictions?

Yes. Look at the (currently unenforcable) shrinkwrap licenses that come on
many major PC packages. They include the kind of restrictions I listed.

>I don't see
>anything wrong with allowing them to make any stipulations they want
>on their products. You don't have to buy the stuff, and if the restrictions
>are too unreasonable, nobody will buy the stuff and the restrictions will
>be lifted or the producer will lose money. Would you buy a software
>product that required that you send flowers to the writer every time
>you ran his program?

Cold hard fact of the PC world: If Lotus required users to send flowers to
Mitch Kapor every time they ran 1-2-3, people would still buy 1-2-3 in the
same quantity they do now. I'm not saying they would send the flowers, they
would ignore the license, but they would still buy the product. The same
could probably be said about dBASE. A lot of people said that users would
never buy copy protected programs, and that the companies that used CP
would go out of business. That didn't happen. People will buy the product
that does what they want, no matter what strings are attached to it. A
lot of those same people will then go out and buy a program to break the
copy protection so they can really get some use out of their software.
These shrinkwrap licenses aren't going to stop anybody from ripping off
software publishers. They will force users into the position where they
will be forced to violate their licneses to make proper use of the software
they bought.