TLDR

End User License Agreements (aka EULA) are more or less the evil side of our everyday work. As an executive, part of my job is to make sure that every product / contract I check is compliant with our company regulation. I cannot apply the Too Long Didn’t Read rule at all, it could be a potential loss for my company due to hidden fees or future lawsuits that any business should avoid.

As a software developer myself, in my early years I applied this rule most of the time, though, blinded by the great availability of “open source” projects, piece of codes, etc. Only later in my growth towards a more executive role, I learned the hard way that “open source” doesn’t always means “free to use”, with a lot degree of grief and blood.

How the code is distributed is not the point, with which license is distributed the code is.

One great example of this is when an open source product suddenly change license from one release to another: developers and even executives upgrade the library to the new version, without double checking if there’s compatibility between the license and code / component usage, that maybe switched to an hybrid commercial model.

But the best case of all was the great adoption of GPL license in my early development years, in the early 2000s. GPL was “the way to go” for having an impressive amount of code and libraries for free. Everybody was applying the TLDR rule, so almost nobody understood that GPL was in fact forcing you to adopt GPL also for YOUR work, exposing companies source code to everyone willing to see it. And don’t get me wrong, it was a totally legit and beautiful thing, given that it was (and still is) the explicit prime directive of the Free Software Foundation. The problem was for businesses, that slowly found this out and were forced to adopt (and pay for) different libraries, if any, or rewrite the code with a sometimes major effort in terms of budget. That also explain why the adoption of the pure GPL license has dropped so much during the years.

Image by Openssource.com

So please, do yourself a favour, and try to avoid TLDR. There’s a reason if someone took the time to write down an end user agreement, and you may be surprised of all the times that I found something weird or incompatible reading it. Speaking about library and software licenses, this is incredibly important because it can expose you and your company to legal cases it probably doesn’t want to incur.

If reading legal terms is not your piece of cake, you can help yourself using online sites that helps you find out the summary of what you can, what you can’t, and what you must do in order to be compliant. I personally use Software Licenses in Plain English when I don’t know / don’t remember do/dont’s/must of a specific license to focus on the key points (usage, code disclosure, rights) and dig into the details if needed.