So far we've gotten an apology and a quick amendment that eliminates the offending clause. Now we just need for the group responsible for the oversight to be fired and one or two sacrificial killings and we'll call it even.
Sure I've copied/reused code. But when I do I usually make sure I understand what it does and works correctly. I also don't work for a mega corporation that has entire brigades of lawyers to get paid to look at these very things. Google apparently didn't understand what it meant nor had any of the many lawyers who get paid to look at these types of things actually look at it.
Do keep in mind that the thing is barely in beta. They're not really releasing it to the public. Besides, it's basically unenforceable, since the code is under a BSD license.
The Chrome browser binary you can download is *based* on the Chromium source code, which is free (see http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instructions-windows [chromium.org] on instructions how to compile). The Chrome browser itself is NOT under the BSD license. I was quite disappointed when I realized that. - Just because they say "open source" somewhere doesn't make the Chrome browser itself open source.
And what's this "installer" program to download the browser for you, why not just give us a download link to the browser itself? Furthermore, the browser will also *update* anytime it feels like it. Afaik there's no way to deactivate this *feature*.
I'd love to see a site dedicated to compiling daily builds of the Chromium source code, maybe through in some forks by private fiddlers, because right now following the instructions from the link requires you to use a non open source tool "gclient" to download about 500MB of source and then compile it using M$ Visual Studio - and then hope it produces a working binary (oh, and have the time for this). So far I couldn't find anyone doing this and putting the binaries online yet - not even using google;)
[...] right now following the instructions from the link [http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instructions-windows [chromium.org]] requires you to use a non open source tool "gclient" to download about 500MB of source and then compile it using M$ Visual Studio [...]
As long as IE uses MSN by default no one can complain. People actually have to take action to use this product. If Google were to force people to use Chrome in order to search it would be leveraging.
That's because MSN search quite frankly sucks. It's a reasonable decision from the perspective of marketing, not to even offer a bottom-barrel service as an option. If MSN were better, it would be an option.
And Microsoft knows it. There's a reason MS tried to buy Yahoo!, and put forth such a serious offer that it caused a small political drama in the Yahoo! board of directors when Yahoo! refused...
The thing is, the language itself was not the most offensive part of this.
What is most offensive is the way these bastards write these absurdly one-sided "agreements", assuming the benefit that if anything is unenforceable it will only selectively be struck, and just pass off their standard shit with every single product assuming nobody will ever read it.
Good thing we have the internets to call them on it this time, but shame on them for doing it in the first place. And not just google, but damn near every tech company. The only reason they fixed it was because the high profile of the product. It's still evil.
"No realli! She was Karving her initials Ãn the mÃÃse with the sharpened end
of an interspace tÃÃthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law -an Oslo
dentist and star of many Norwegian mÃvies: "The HÃt Hands of an Oslo
Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge MÃlars of Horst Nordfink"... "
Instead, this thread has been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute.
The Producers would like to thank The Forestry Commission Doune Admissions Ltd, Keir and Cowdor Estates, Stirling University, and the people of Doune for their help in the making of this thread.
The Characters and incidents portrayed and the names used are fictitious and any similarity to the names, characters, or history of any person is entirely accidental and unintentional.
Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
JOHN GOLDSTONE & "RALPH" The Wonder Llama
EARL J. LLAMA
MIKE Q. LLAMA III
SY LLAMA
MERLE Z. LLAMA IX
Directed By
40 SPECIALLY TRAINED
ECUADORIAN MOUNTAIN LLAMAS
6 VENEZUELAN RED LLAMAS
142 MEXICAN WHOOPING LLAMAS
14 NORTH CHILEAN GUANACOS
(CLOSELY RELATED TO THE LLAMA)
REG LLAMA OF BRIXTON
76000 BATTERY LLAMAS
FROM "LLAMA-FRESH" FARMS NEARE PARAGUAY
and (apologies to)
TERRY GILLIAM AND TERRY JONES
Umm, nice try troll. It was a genuine concern. The clause had the potential to be a huge land grab. It's hard to say whether it was an accident or they really got the message but it's been fixed. It's not the only time it's happened. I seem to remember both Apple and MS trying that sort of thing in the past, it's a bit easier to believe that Google just made a mistake though.
Firefox users are not going to switch to Chrome. It's just inane to suggest that's the case. It doesn't run on anything other than Windows at this point, and it looks like it's going to be a pain to be ported to anything else.
On the resource side of things, they're going to have to make a significant amount of improvement to be competitive with Firefox on performance. Sure web surfing is apparently faster, but that's against the 3.0 release and neglects the impact of memory hogging and the tweaks coming down the pipe in 3.1.
Or to put it another way, it's premature to suggest that Chrome is going to be stealing Firefox users. More likely they'll be stealing IE users away. Might very well slow adoptin of Firefox, but it's unlikely to make a significant impact.
Firefox users are not going to switch to Chrome. It's just inane to suggest that's the case. It doesn't run on anything other than Windows at this point, and it looks like it's going to be a pain to be ported to anything else.
The vast majority of Firefox users are running Windows. I don't see the lack of other platforms making much difference here.
Or to put it another way, it's premature to suggest that Chrome is going to be stealing Firefox users. More likely they'll be stealing IE users away. Might very well slow adoptin of Firefox, but it's unlikely to make a significant impact.
The factor you seem to be ignoring is that Firefox users are more likely to be early adopters. So I think they are more likely to at least try Chrome.
Chrome works just fine for me on Vista64 and integrates very slickly with Aero Glass. If you look at the build requirements it lists the Vista SDK, so frankly I'd be pretty amused if it didn't work on on Vista.
If you use Privoxy [privoxy.org] you can have Chrome with ad blocking as well. Works like a charm for me. Credit to this blog [fritscher.ch] for pointing me in the right direction.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday September 04 2008, @08:28PM (#24882765)
That's not the only thing that prevents Firefox users from using chrome. The other two big things are the lack of add-ons and Windows exclusivity, both subject to change. As soon as Chrome has a decent enough equivalent to Adblock and Noscript, and maybe better keyboard-only navigation, I'll be all over it.
[so do they]
relinquish rights to the stuff that may have been created before the update?
No, they said that this change would be applied retroactively.
...right, and since "retroactively" means [answers.com] "Influencing or applying to a period prior to enactment", that would make the answer yes, not no. How did this get moderated informative?
Almost any software program does that, why? Because the Windows registry is an absolute pain. Its like saying that apt-get remove still leaves some files behind. Unfortunately there isn't an apt-get purge function for Windows.
Heck, I'm surprised there's no community project out there to provide an EULA-free Chrome fork.
2 main reasons. Right now, Chrome is essentially Windows only, and as we know, most people who use Windows don't care about EULAs. And secondly, Chrome isn't used much, right now people are wondering if it is the future or nothing more then a nice experiment, if Chrome stays around then expect Debian to fork it like they did with Mozilla. If it dies, expect a very small fork to continue development of it.
Mod parent up. I played around with Chrome and was impressed at its speed (except for Pandora *vomits*) and was taken in by the minimalistic interface. I have no gripe with the awesome-bar or whatever lame title it has either. Once some extensions materialize for this (noscript/adblock) it's going to be a decent browser.
I'm not too concerned about the memory usage as all my main machines are less than five years old.
This might be a cake-and-eat-it-too situation if a community project forms to do as parent describes. It makes me wonder if someone at google is not only 'not being evil' but wants to do something benevolent.
Can't we have a legal system that would just dismiss something so rediculous and unreasonable???
You know, something to protect the people??
They could have put "by agreeing, we will assume the deed to your house", and I'm sure the number of downloads wouldn't have changed.
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday September 04 2008, @08:10PM (#24882601)
It's never been used in court. There's no requirement that the courts approve every legal document before it's made public.
This is already a major concern with EULAs, actually -- there are restrictions on how much you can really sign away, especially if it's a document that you don't sign, that nobody witnesses, that you only sort of have an opportunity to disagree with, and that everyone knows that nobody reads. Many clauses in EULAs are assumed not to be able to hold up in court. The likelihood that this one would be is slim at best (considering they have no way to track what information was posted using Chrome, that it's enormously wide-sweeping, and it's trivially circumvented by downloading the source and compiling).
Can't we have a legal system that would just dismiss something so ridiculous and unreasonable???
This actually happened just the other day. A court in Washington state struck down [arstechnica.com] the AT&T long distance Terms of Service. The court ruled that the TOS was "'unconscionable,' meaning that no reasonable individual would have agreed to them had he or she realized their full scope." (quoting from the Ars Technica story).
A PDF of the decision is here [wa.gov]. The interesting bits seem to start around page 23 or so, though my eyes glazed over fairly quickly.
All this is scaremongering. Your confidential business data, bank account details, personal preferences in pornography, medical records and DNA sequence are strictly a matter between you and Google's marketing department, and no-one else. Remember, they're not evil! [today.com]
Don't forget their HR department. When I applied at Google, things were going pretty well until I started searching for things like: Farting on Coworkers. Forging a Resume. Stealing Company Secrets. Where can I get a plague rat in Santa Monica? AIDS tests in Santa Monica. California Law and 'giving AIDS to coworkers'. Can I get arrested for giving AIDS to my coworkers? Can Google be brought down from the inside? How to bring down a company from the inside. Define: Arson.
1. Loudly complain about annoying features in the beta stage 2. Watch as company removes said features because they're in vulnerable position 3. Rinse and repeat on other products 4. Realize why so many corporations fight for control of the media 5. Start your own local newspaper 6. ? 7. Go out of business because nobody reads newspapers anymore, you moron
1 a: a sudden or violent increase in activity or currency b: a sudden rise in the incidence of a disease c: a sudden increase in numbers of a harmful organism and especially an insect within a particular area
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday September 04 2008, @07:56PM (#24882467)
They took the standard EULA that they use for everything, and slapped it on - it was the easiest thing for the programmers to do at the time, no thought required, just use the standard legal mumbo-jumbo. An understandable mistake, and they've corrected it.
Umm, that's what a boilerplate is for. For pretty much any other service they have it would have been fine. Or at least in keeping with the competition.
The only reason why it's a problem is because this is one of like two things they're providing where it's not appropriate. Google has a much larger number of projects for which a clause like that is pretty much mandatory to provide the service.
Corporations just don't copy and past legal stuff -- EVER.
As a past member of three corporate legal departments, I'm ROFL at this quote. Most contracts start as boilerplate and only get changed through negotiation between the parties.
Google Chrome (Score:5, Funny)
Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure I've copied/reused code. But when I do I usually make sure I understand what it does and works correctly. I also don't work for a mega corporation that has entire brigades of lawyers to get paid to look at these very things. Google apparently didn't understand what it meant nor had any of the many lawyers who get paid to look at these types of things actually look at it.
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Do keep in mind that the thing is barely in beta. They're not really releasing it to the public. Besides, it's basically unenforceable, since the code is under a BSD license.
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Informative)
It's available for download on their main page. This seems to me that they really are releasing it to the public.
Parent
Chrome code not public! (Score:5, Interesting)
And what's this "installer" program to download the browser for you, why not just give us a download link to the browser itself? Furthermore, the browser will also *update* anytime it feels like it. Afaik there's no way to deactivate this *feature*.
I'd love to see a site dedicated to compiling daily builds of the Chromium source code, maybe through in some forks by private fiddlers, because right now following the instructions from the link requires you to use a non open source tool "gclient" to download about 500MB of source and then compile it using M$ Visual Studio - and then hope it produces a working binary (oh, and have the time for this). So far I couldn't find anyone doing this and putting the binaries online yet - not even using google
Parent
Re:Chrome code not public! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it seems that gclient is open source (python source with Apache License 2.0) and you can get source for it with a simple
svn co http://gclient.googlecode.com/svn/trunk [googlecode.com] gclient-dev
For more information, see http://code.google.com/p/gclient/wiki/StartingDevelopment [google.com]
Parent
Re:Chrome code not public! (Score:5, Informative)
I'd love to see a site dedicated to compiling daily builds of the Chromium source code
You can download snapshot of the latest version of Chromium for XP from the buildbot here : http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/ [chromium.org]
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Informative)
No, the *code* is under a BSD license, one of the things about BSD style licenses is that the binaries can have whatever license you want (see OSX).
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because MSN search quite frankly sucks. It's a reasonable decision from the perspective of marketing, not to even offer a bottom-barrel service as an option. If MSN were better, it would be an option.
And Microsoft knows it. There's a reason MS tried to buy Yahoo!, and put forth such a serious offer that it caused a small political drama in the Yahoo! board of directors when Yahoo! refused...
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Informative)
More information here [scroogle.org] and here [scroogle.org].
Firefox search plugin available too, but some links to it don't work.
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:4, Interesting)
What does the tilde mean? I've seen it a lot lately.
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Informative)
Some people are trying to make it a new punctuation mark to indicate sarcasm.
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Funny)
Some people are trying to make it a new punctuation mark to indicate sarcasm.
Sarcasm markup? Now, that's useful~
Parent
fire them indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing is, the language itself was not the most offensive part of this.
What is most offensive is the way these bastards write these absurdly one-sided "agreements", assuming the benefit that if anything is unenforceable it will only selectively be struck, and just pass off their standard shit with every single product assuming nobody will ever read it.
Good thing we have the internets to call them on it this time, but shame on them for doing it in the first place. And not just google, but damn near every tech company. The only reason they fixed it was because the high profile of the product. It's still evil.
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Funny)
"We apologise again for the fault in the
TOS. Those responsible for sacking
the people who have just been sacked,
have been sacked."
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:5, Funny)
"The directors of the firm hired to amend the TOS after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked."
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:4, Funny)
"No realli! She was Karving her initials Ãn the mÃÃse with the sharpened end
of an interspace tÃÃthbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law -an Oslo
dentist and star of many Norwegian mÃvies: "The HÃt Hands of an Oslo
Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge MÃlars of Horst Nordfink"... "
Parent
Re:Well that sounds reasonable. (Score:4, Funny)
Instead, this thread has been completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute.
The Producers would like to thank The Forestry Commission Doune Admissions Ltd, Keir and Cowdor Estates, Stirling University, and the people of Doune for their help in the making of this thread.
The Characters and incidents portrayed and the names used are fictitious and any similarity to the names, characters, or history of any person is entirely accidental and unintentional.
Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
JOHN GOLDSTONE & "RALPH" The Wonder Llama
EARL J. LLAMA
MIKE Q. LLAMA III
SY LLAMA
MERLE Z. LLAMA IX
Directed By
40 SPECIALLY TRAINED
ECUADORIAN MOUNTAIN LLAMAS
6 VENEZUELAN RED LLAMAS
142 MEXICAN WHOOPING LLAMAS
14 NORTH CHILEAN GUANACOS
(CLOSELY RELATED TO THE LLAMA)
REG LLAMA OF BRIXTON
76000 BATTERY LLAMAS
FROM "LLAMA-FRESH" FARMS NEARE PARAGUAY
and (apologies to)
TERRY GILLIAM AND TERRY JONES
Parent
Re:What Will Firefox Fanboys Do Now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, nice try troll. It was a genuine concern. The clause had the potential to be a huge land grab. It's hard to say whether it was an accident or they really got the message but it's been fixed. It's not the only time it's happened. I seem to remember both Apple and MS trying that sort of thing in the past, it's a bit easier to believe that Google just made a mistake though.
Firefox users are not going to switch to Chrome. It's just inane to suggest that's the case. It doesn't run on anything other than Windows at this point, and it looks like it's going to be a pain to be ported to anything else.
On the resource side of things, they're going to have to make a significant amount of improvement to be competitive with Firefox on performance. Sure web surfing is apparently faster, but that's against the 3.0 release and neglects the impact of memory hogging and the tweaks coming down the pipe in 3.1.
Or to put it another way, it's premature to suggest that Chrome is going to be stealing Firefox users. More likely they'll be stealing IE users away. Might very well slow adoptin of Firefox, but it's unlikely to make a significant impact.
Parent
Re:What Will Firefox Fanboys Do Now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox users are not going to switch to Chrome. It's just inane to suggest that's the case. It doesn't run on anything other than Windows at this point, and it looks like it's going to be a pain to be ported to anything else.
The vast majority of Firefox users are running Windows. I don't see the lack of other platforms making much difference here.
Or to put it another way, it's premature to suggest that Chrome is going to be stealing Firefox users. More likely they'll be stealing IE users away. Might very well slow adoptin of Firefox, but it's unlikely to make a significant impact.
The factor you seem to be ignoring is that Firefox users are more likely to be early adopters. So I think they are more likely to at least try Chrome.
Parent
Re:What Will Firefox Fanboys Do Now? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm running xp-64 and run Chrome just fine.
Parent
Re:What Will Firefox Fanboys Do Now? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:What Will Firefox Fanboys Do Now? (Score:5, Informative)
If you use Privoxy [privoxy.org] you can have Chrome with ad blocking as well. Works like a charm for me. Credit to this blog [fritscher.ch] for pointing me in the right direction.
Denny
Parent
Re:What Will Firefox Fanboys Do Now? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not the only thing that prevents Firefox users from using chrome. The other two big things are the lack of add-ons and Windows exclusivity, both subject to change. As soon as Chrome has a decent enough equivalent to Adblock and Noscript, and maybe better keyboard-only navigation, I'll be all over it.
Parent
So do they... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So do they... (Score:5, Informative)
[so do they] relinquish rights to the stuff that may have been created before the update?
No, they said that this change would be applied retroactively.
...right, and since "retroactively" means [answers.com] "Influencing or applying to a period prior to enactment", that would make the answer yes, not no. How did this get moderated informative?
Parent
Now if only the uninstaller would really uninstall (Score:4, Interesting)
If you uninstall Chrome, it leaves a few google'isms behind...
Like googleupdate and a few other registry entries... /sigh...
time to reload Winbloze...
Re:Now if only the uninstaller would really uninst (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Now if only the uninstaller would really uninst (Score:4, Interesting)
Did you file a bug?
Parent
You must agree to.... [CLICK] (Score:5, Insightful)
See.... nobody, not even Google themselves ever reads the freakin' legal boilerplate crap you have to click on to install software.
But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But.. (Score:5, Informative)
Why is this modded "Funny"? The code is under a BSD license. You can do exactly that.
Heck, I'm surprised there's no community project out there to provide an EULA-free Chrome fork.
Parent
Re:But.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Heck, I'm surprised there's no community project out there to provide an EULA-free Chrome fork.
2 main reasons. Right now, Chrome is essentially Windows only, and as we know, most people who use Windows don't care about EULAs. And secondly, Chrome isn't used much, right now people are wondering if it is the future or nothing more then a nice experiment, if Chrome stays around then expect Debian to fork it like they did with Mozilla. If it dies, expect a very small fork to continue development of it.
Parent
Re:But.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Sane legal system please?? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sane legal system please?? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's never been used in court. There's no requirement that the courts approve every legal document before it's made public.
This is already a major concern with EULAs, actually -- there are restrictions on how much you can really sign away, especially if it's a document that you don't sign, that nobody witnesses, that you only sort of have an opportunity to disagree with, and that everyone knows that nobody reads. Many clauses in EULAs are assumed not to be able to hold up in court. The likelihood that this one would be is slim at best (considering they have no way to track what information was posted using Chrome, that it's enormously wide-sweeping, and it's trivially circumvented by downloading the source and compiling).
Parent
Re:Sane legal system please?? (Score:5, Informative)
Can't we have a legal system that would just dismiss something so ridiculous and unreasonable???
This actually happened just the other day. A court in Washington state struck down [arstechnica.com] the AT&T long distance Terms of Service. The court ruled that the TOS was "'unconscionable,' meaning that no reasonable individual would have agreed to them had he or she realized their full scope." (quoting from the Ars Technica story).
A PDF of the decision is here [wa.gov]. The interesting bits seem to start around page 23 or so, though my eyes glazed over fairly quickly.
-- Laura
Parent
Don't be silly (Score:5, Funny)
All this is scaremongering. Your confidential business data, bank account details, personal preferences in pornography, medical records and DNA sequence are strictly a matter between you and Google's marketing department, and no-one else. Remember, they're not evil! [today.com]
Re:Don't be silly (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Secret Sauce (Score:5, Funny)
1. Loudly complain about annoying features in the beta stage
2. Watch as company removes said features because they're in vulnerable position
3. Rinse and repeat on other products
4. Realize why so many corporations fight for control of the media
5. Start your own local newspaper
6. ?
7. Go out of business because nobody reads newspapers anymore, you moron
Re:TOS (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the OP had it right, its just an "outbreak"... saying a sudden outbreak is redundant.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/outbreak [merriam-webster.com]
Main Entry:
outbreak
Function:
noun
Date:
1602
1 a: a sudden or violent increase in activity or currency
b: a sudden rise in the incidence of a disease
c: a sudden increase in numbers of a harmful organism and especially an insect within a particular area
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3A+outbreak [google.com]
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/outbreak [reference.com]
etc, etc...
Parent
Re:TOS (Score:5, Insightful)
They took the standard EULA that they use for everything, and slapped it on - it was the easiest thing for the programmers to do at the time, no thought required, just use the standard legal mumbo-jumbo. An understandable mistake, and they've corrected it.
Parent
Re:TOS (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm, that's what a boilerplate is for. For pretty much any other service they have it would have been fine. Or at least in keeping with the competition.
The only reason why it's a problem is because this is one of like two things they're providing where it's not appropriate. Google has a much larger number of projects for which a clause like that is pretty much mandatory to provide the service.
Parent
Re:TOS (Score:5, Informative)
Corporations just don't copy and past legal stuff -- EVER.
As a past member of three corporate legal departments, I'm ROFL at this quote. Most contracts start as boilerplate and only get changed through negotiation between the parties.
Parent
Re:TOS (Score:4, Funny)
I have a copy of the PC game Morrowind whose EULA explicitly prevents me from using it.
I'm pretty sure it's down to copy-paste.
Parent