License clarifications
The License has a few small issues that I think should be cleaned up for clarity:
- The license may serve as an EULA, but is in and of itself not entirely an EULA. So the following line under Definitions:
In this End User Licence Agreement,
Should probably be changed to something like:
This license, which also serves as a general End User License Agreement [EULA], the following terms shall be interpreted by these definitions:
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The "licenser" in definitions should be "licensor". A licenser is an entity which issues licenses from a licensor to licensees. So, Shinobi/Moe is the licensor - if someone was sublicensing (such as selling Shinobi installations and collecting license fees from their customers and sending those fees to Shinobi/Moe) they would be the licenser. For legal clarity Shiboi should be listed as the licensor so it is clear there is not parent to Shinobi and that in a legal dispute it would be Shinobi who holds the licensing rights.
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"Commercial use" should be defined, as it can be creatively interpreted without a definition. EG: could a shop could use Shinobi for free if they are not charging people to view the streams? Depending on interpretation, some could consider commercial a usage where revenue is derived from the utilization of the product, rather than the product being utilized by a commercial entity. Defining commercial use as one or the other or both (or something else) would clarify that and make the license more enforceable.
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The clarifications:
- Educational use
and- Use in a School like a elementary school, college, or university
are effectively the same? Perhaps "Educational use" should be changed to "When used for research or educational purposes" and the second line be changed to "Usage by Educational institutions"? -
The line:
LICENSEE may modify the code but LICENSEE must provide the source code if asked by law enforcement or an authorized Shinobi representative. LICENSEE must keep all copyright notices unchanged.
Should be clarified. EG:
LICENSEE may modify code for personal use but must provide these changes upon request from Shinobi Systems or an authorized Shinobi representative. LICENSEE may not alter or change copyright notices. All code changes by LICENSEE shall fall under the copyright of Shinobi Systems in the case code modified by LICENSEE is integrated into the official Shinobi code base.
*There's no particular reason to explicitly allow law enforcement the ability to request information like that, as in many countries it would require a court order and if we explicitly allow that it sort of gives the police a loophole which me maybe don't want to give. *Note how I added the part about integrating code into the code base. This DIFFERS from the "contributed code" section as code that is requested and integrated is not necessarily "contributed", so covering it separately is probably a good idea. EG: a company heavily modifies Shinobi but does not submit patches - with this clarification I added you could request those changes and integrate them at your discretion - whereas if you only have the contribution clause it would be the volition of the 3rd party that made the changes to choose weather or not they want to make those available to you to integrate.
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Not completely necessary but there isn't much of a reason to have allcaps for the Disclaimer of Warranty and Limitation of Liability sections? They're fine as they are though so just leaving them as allcaps for emphasis is perfectly acceptable I think.
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Why offer a concession of $5CAD for losses? This seems to contradict the Disclaimer of Warranty. I recommend removing any concession of damage payment or perhaps only offering a partial refund on license fees as a concession. You're already offering the software mostly for free - there's no reason to let people hold you financially responsible even for $5 because a cron job tweaked out.
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Legal Proceedings should probably explicitly define a location, or should clarify "the current headquarters" to "the current jurisdiction which Shinobi Systems falls under" or something like that. Generally you want to explicitly define whatever jurisdiction is most beneficial to you as the project lead/controller, even if that is not the jurisdiction you currently reside in (EG if you like US contract and copyright law better define jurisdiction to be a location in the US that would be accessible to you).