Write an EULA XML like

Recently I had to read yet another EULA which is often an exhausting, time eating process. At that moment I got the idea to write EULA’s in a XML like style

Disclaimer: This is a crazy idea, and far away from anything I deal usually with. It just jumped to my head and I found it funny enough to write down – and I#m sure tomorrow I will regret it. Also, I’m not a lawyer at all! So you might want to skip and forget this post.

My main problem is: most EULA’s or TOS or similar documents (in this case it was a new EULA from PayPal, btw.) are many pages long filled with important information of a quite high density. If you want to go through them you are lost if you are not used to read such texts. And even if you are used to read such texts it is still very exhausting and time eating – hardly anyone besides lawyers or concerned people read them.

Now imagine the TOS or an EULA would be spiced up with XML characteristics. For example, a part of the GPL looks usually like that:

You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.

However, it could also look like that:


<you>
<modify>
<copy>
You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License.
<consequences of violation>
Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.
</consequences of violation>
</modify>
</copy>
</you>


The advantages of such a system are clear: first of all, the existing EULA’s would not have to be altered: they could continue to exist as they are. Also, new licence agreements could be written as everyone is used to.
However, these above mentioned tags could be added – giving the parts a meaning. This makes it much easier to read and especially much easier to filter them. People could quickly check for key words and would be faced with the parts of the agreement which are necessary. Imagine next time you have to read an EULA you are faced with a set of key words to filter this EULA and simply only show all parts necessary for that given keyword. Would make reading these EULA’s much, much easier.

Of course, since we are speaking about the law system here these filtering methods would have to have a mark saying “you still have to read the rest, filtering cannot be perfect and is just here to make it easier, ladidadida”. But that’s for lawyers, and tagged EULAs would be read more often than the current existing ones, I think.

Actually, I wonder if there are already existing solutions which tag existing EULA’s and similar law texts so that lawyers can faster go through them and easier filter them.

Fedora’s rc becomes dependency aware

Harald Hoyer, a Red Hat developer, has released a first draft with details of the possible new Fedora init system. The /etc/rc.d/rc system will become dependency aware.

Almost all distributions are working in some way or the other at improving the init system: Ubuntu develops its Upstart, openSuse tries to improve the init scripts massively, and some distributions picked up projects like InitNG.

It was generally agreed that Fedora must also do something in this regard, however the plans to improve the situation for Fedora 7 have been delayed to Fedora 8. There were some discussions but really happened, and not even benchmark tests were done.

However, now Harald Hoyer updated several related wiki pages showing the possible future: /etc/rc.d/rc will become dependency aware making it possible to boot services in parallel. Also, D-Bus will be included to get more information about the system services. Also, the window manager will be fired up quite quickly, possibly even with flexible dependencies (sometimes you need network, sometimes not), to give the user the fastest possible feedback.

It is good to see some progress – and at least my tests with InitNG show that parallel booting can improve the boot time quite a lot compared to a standard boot sequence.

However, there are several things I don’t like about these new proposals: I have the feeling that all other attempts were not even really tested – although InitNG is already part of Fedora Extras, and although I for example also made upstart run on Fedora. Why were these attempts not tested in general?
I must admit that I cannot even see reasons against Upstart, because it does deliver the features needed: dependency handling, parallel booting, a connection to D-Bus. At least the first two are also handled by InitNG.

In general I miss a real discussion of the pros and cons of the existing solutions and existing attempts to solve the problem for Fedora. Scott Remnant, the main developer behind Upstart, spent quite some time comparing existing solutions with each other and figuring out the needs of today’s Linux distributions. I have seen nothing comparable from the Fedora developers yet. And with comparable I mean a paper like discussion of the topic, not the existing (worth reading) e-mail discussions.
After all I would like to know why there should be yet another solution developed while there are alternatives like Launchd, Upstart, InitNG and also openSUSE’s attempt available. I don’t like the idea of an init war.

But maybe the changes for Fedora 8 will be more temporary until it turns out which new init system really is worth porting?