from Hacker News

EULAs Aren’t Inherently Evil – Proprietary done right can beat free and open

by mdb31 on 4/23/22, 3:30 PM with 46 comments

• by josephcsible on 4/23/22, 5:40 PM

  So these are the two claimed benefits of proprietary software (everything else listed is either the same as or worse than FOSS):

  > the seller guarantees the software will work as documented, won’t be infected with malware, won’t be riddled with security holes, won’t contain plagiarized code

  > the seller provides support and maintenance via e-mail, with a response-time service-level agreement

  But there's nothing inherent to proprietary software about either of those things. There's nothing stopping you from using a FOSS license for your software itself, and selling a separate contract that gives those two things.

• by Ourgon on 4/23/22, 5:08 PM

  Proprietary vs. open is like renting vs. owning without the legal protection offered to renters. If your data is locked in some proprietary format you're beholden to the proprietor who can - and often does - abuse his power by raising prices, adding intrusive 'features', selling access to your eyes and more. No EULA is going to change that since those agreements can be changed more or less at will.

  In other words keep your EULA, I don't want it.

• by Beltiras on 4/23/22, 5:29 PM

  I've never seen proprietary software licenses not have an AS-IS clause. The license presented will be offered by no sane software house.

• by noasaservice on 4/23/22, 3:45 PM

  > Those who take the deal aren’t “locked in” by some dark legal magic.

  No, they're locked in because this application has a likely proprietary data format, and conversion means you lose content... If you're even allow to export.

  Proprietary programs act as data roach motels: your data checks in, and it dont check out.

  > The customer gets source and permission to hack it. This is way more normal in business-to-business software deals than hackers tend to think.

  Almost all proprietary software won't do this. And I've dealt with a lot of proprietary software. At best, I've seen an agreement that if the company died, they would get escrow sourcecode. And that was 1 company.

• by Brian_K_White on 4/23/22, 6:43 PM

  I want to downvote the article itself but upvote the act of surfacing it for discussion.

• by mdb31 on 4/23/22, 3:39 PM

  My take: end-users don't care very much about the license, and even for technical users, the value of an 'open' license is overstated. I simply cannot fix bugs in, say, GCC, and it would also be pretty hard for me to pay someone to do so, despite this project being pretty much the poster child (other than, of course, Linux, but that is not exactly a typical case...) for the GPL.

  Corporate users want a way out of an abusive or impossible vendor relationship: source escrow can fix that as well as the GPL can (which is to say: not exactly entirely, but, close, I guess?).

  Regular users want... things just to work, and someone to shout at if it doesn't. The license of the underlying source code is pretty much irrelevant for that. There are at least three levels of support/indirection prior to that making any difference.

• by pgcj_poster on 4/23/22, 5:31 PM

  It seems like all of the benefits named here are a result of paying developers... not a result of software being proprietary.