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Re:No, you don't own it: Court upholds EULAs, threatens digi... by _delirium on Friday September 10, 2010 @10:03PM (#1680812)
It's also not clear to me what distinguishes this from the book EULAs that were held unenforceable in the original 1908 case. Publishers there printed purported "licenses" on the copyright page of their books, including terms like "you may not resell this book for less than $1.00". But those were held not to be enforceable, because it was held that the contractual relationship between publisher and bookbuyer is terminated when the sale is completed, at least in the normal case of books sold at retail (books provided under privately negotiated contracts, like documentation provided under an NDA, can still be enforced).

Could something like that be upheld today if the publisher were a bit more careful with its legal fictions? Perhaps something like: You are granted a single, non-transferable, non-exclusive license to read this book. For your convenience, a hardcopy, which remains the sole property of Publishing Co., has been provided for your use. You may retain this copy so long as you remain in compliance with this license, but may not transfer it to any other party.

Re:No, you don't own it: Court upholds EULAs, threatens digi... by Natsu on Saturday September 11, 2010 @04:17AM (#1681202)
This sort of nonsense got me to look up free software CAD programs. Sadly, the big one is BRL-CAD and the documentation for it is downright depressing.

Their FAQ ( http://brlcad.org/wiki/FAQ ) tells me that the silly thing can't even print out a drawing normally! Essentially, you render your current view to a BLR-CAD format, use a command line tool to turn that into a PNG, then print that via some other program, not supplied.

Does nobody using it print enough things to want a normal print dialog? If anyone wants to see what I mean, look for the question "How do I get a hard copy of what I'm looking at in MGED?" (MGED is the geometry editor for BRL-CAD.)

To be fair, their list of priorities DOES list UI improvement. I'll have to see if I can find some ways to help... assuming I figure out how to use this thing.

Re:No, you don't own it: Court upholds EULAs, threatens digi... by _delirium on Saturday September 11, 2010 @04:34AM (#1681217)
Yeah, it's an unfortunate niche. I think it's the sort of thing where there are companies that would be happy to contribute back code, but only if a CAD program were already at 80% of their needs. But without commercial support, the hobbyist-CAD community is way too small to get a system to that 80% to begin with. Lots of industry doesn't really enjoy paying large per-seat license fees for the dominant CAD systems, so I think they'd be willing to work on an open-source one and contribute back, the way embedded-systems companies do with Linux, but they aren't willing to take a leap onto something that isn't there yet

BRL-CAD's particular problems are because it's sort of a time-capsule project, I think. It's an Army project from the 1980s that was open-sourced in 2004, but is still very "1980s Unix workstation" in a lot of ways, and the ratio of interested developers to giant crufty codebase has meant that modernizing it is slow.

Re:No, you don't own it: Court upholds EULAs, threatens digi... by jhghjnmmn on Saturday September 11, 2010 @12:03AM (#1680967)
The difference is that book publishers don't make huge political donations
Re:No, you don't own it: Court upholds EULAs, threatens digi... by jrockway on Saturday September 11, 2010 @01:00AM (#1681008)
Do CAD software makers?
Re:No, you don't own it: Court upholds EULAs, threatens digi... by CamperBob on Saturday September 11, 2010 @01:11AM (#1681020)
No, but the MPAA damned sure does.