We know that most End User License Agreements (EULAs) are ridiculously one-sided in favor of the software publisher, but are they all the same? If customers knew which publishers offer better terms, could we hold all publishers to a higher standard of fairness? The only way to find out is by starting our EULA reviews.
This week I'm inaugurating a new "EULA Reviews" section in the GripeLog devoted to this effort, and to kick it off we're going to undertake a comparison between the licenses of Adobe Photoshop CS and Autodesk AutoCad 2005. This is very much a work-in-progress, and before we arrive at a truly final score for Photoshop and AutoCad's terms, I'm going to need feedback and help from a number of you. One thing that I am certain of though is that, when all is said and done, we will have clearly demonstrated that some software companies play much fairer than others.
Of course, it's not an accident I've chosen these two particular products. If you read my earlier "Mystery License" column about some of the outrageous terms in the AutoCad license, you can already guess who the loser is going to be. In fact, I got the idea to compare it with an Adobe license agreement when one reader posted the incorrect guess that the mystery license might be from Adobe. Other readers quickly pointed out that it couldn't be from Adobe, since Adobe very prominently publishes all its EULAs on its website, and that - perhaps as a result - Adobe tends to have some reasonable-sounding agreements.
Now, as I've noted previously, AutoCad's EULA does have a few redeeming virtues. And the Photoshop CS license agreement still has a number of negatives, particularly some of those unfair disclaimers I've always ranted about. Nonetheless, at least as far major software publishers go, I think we have the opposite ends of the spectrum here. (However, there are other major publishers - Intuit, for example - that seem to be just as secretive with their EULAs as Autodesk is, so future reader sneakwrap sightings may reveal even greater extremes.) And that's just what we need for our purposes here, because we're not just out to find which of these EULAs is the most unfair. We also need to be able to quantify just how much worse it is.
The real goal of this exercise is to create a methodology that will allow us - not just me, but readers as well - to score any EULA with a degree of objectivity. A fairness quotient, or perhaps an unfairness quotient, is what we're looking for. And I think when we're finished with these two EULAs on my website over the next few weeks, we'll have taken a very big step to getting there.
What you'll find in the "EULA Reviews" section of my website now is my preliminary release of the comparison between the AutoCad and Photoshop EULAs that includes my first crack at computing a total score for each. In addition, I've posted a number of separate stories that compare the terms in detail on such topics as warranties, liabilities, and usage limitations. I hope those of you who are really into this stuff will take a look at those and post your comments and your own scoring.
As creating this first comparison has turned out to be an even bigger effort than I'd originally expected, I'll be posting more components of it over the next week or two. But there's enough already posted to get us started. And I apologize that my blog engine isn't ideal for this application, but it will have to do for now. If there are any web developers out there with free time to donate in the cause of building a site specifically for this, give me a shout.
For those of you who aren't interested enough in these issues to bother reading about in detail on my website, I certainly don't blame you. Just in case you're a little curious, I'll tell you that my preliminary scoring gives the Adobe Photoshop CS terms a score of minus two points and Autodesk AutoCad 2005 a score of minus eighteen. That's on a scale that ranges I don't know how far into the positive for truly fair terms, and infinitely into the negative for the infinite number of unfair terms to be found in sneakwrap licenses.
Why do Adobe and Autodesk take such a different approach to the license agreements? I just don't know. There's clear evidence in the Photoshop EULA that Adobe is trying to comform to international standards of behavior, rather than taking the American approach of throwing every nasty, one-sided thing they can think of into their legalese. But both companies do a lot of their business overseas, so why should Adobe be more concerned with playing by the more genteel rules that prevail elsewhere? Beats me -- let's hear your theories. Post your comments in the EULA Reviews section of my website or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.
9:47:58 PM 
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