May 3rd, 2007
End of the gotcha clause?
Ever since launching this blog I've written stories about "gotcha" clauses.
These are additions to standard contracts, usually meant to confer some commercial advantage to the provider.
It turns out Don Imus had a "gotcha" clause in his contract with CBS. Of course, this was language in an employment contract, not a software license, so the previous sentence is itself an example of a "gotcha" clause. (So is the picture, the cover of a 1974 record album.)
SugarCRM has a gotcha clause, which requires you give it attribution on screens you write with it. Every once in a while a "no open source" clause is discovered, written by a company which back-in-the-day feared being taken to court for code someone else had copyrighted.
Last year GPU, a distributed computing project, got a lot of publicity by adding a "no military use" gotcha clause to its GPL license. My recent visit to the FAQ indicates that clause has been quietly dropped.
Which is my point. As with software, license language becomes standardized over time. We know what the GPL is. We have a common understanding of the Mozilla and Apache licenses. Most of us have conformed our business practices to those standard terms.
The language fits the business practices, not the other way around. It's an important lesson. The days of the "gotcha" clause in software licenses are quickly fading into history.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 05/03/07
