Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!brahms.berkeley.edu!silverio
From: silverio@brahms.berkeley.edu (C J Silverio)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: licensing agreements
Message-ID: <1989Dec27.180649.16935@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 27 Dec 89 18:06:49 GMT
References: <14956@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <9338@hoptoad.uucp> <9430@spool.cs.wisc.edu> <1989Dec26.212420.19786@dvinci.usask.ca>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: silverio@brahms.berkeley.edu.UUCP (C J Silverio)
Organization: Bath Department, UC Merkeley
Lines: 26

Irving Reid likes Think C's license:
  Check out the "limited warranty" on Think C 4.0.  In an age where most
  software is sold "as is", they warrant that their software will
  operate "substantially as documented", and promise to correct either
  the software or documentation or give you your money back if it
  doesn't.  I've been suffering through a contract lately using a 4GL
  that's buggy as hell, so I'm pretty sensitive about this sort of stuff.
  Congratulations to Symantec for actually caring enough about software
  quality to guarantee that their stuff really works.

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the net, but I once used the
"warrantee of implied merchantability" -- that a given product will
perform "substantially as advertised/documented" -- to get my money
back for a database program that, well, substantially DIDN'T.

The point is that all those warranties that say, basically, "by using
our product, you agree that you have no warrantees or legal recourse
whatsoever" are just plain LYING. Many states in the US enforce
certain warrantees no matter what the license says. No amount of
capital letters, bold, italic, mumbo-jumbo about "sealed packages",
etc, can change that. This is what that incantation about "your rights
may vary from state to state" means. It also means that a consumer
practically must hire a lawyer to figure out what rights s/he has. Not
that the lawyer can help, since the products usually are too
inexpensive to fight about in court, and recently judges have been
quavering back and forth about what the laws actually mean ANYWAY.