Saturday, October 28, 2017

Should we allow modification of EULA?

In CA API Developer Portal, when an API consumer wants to subscribe to a published API, he/she has to accept the EULA (End-User License Agreement). I believe this is the same for all other products out there.

So a customer of mine asked me the other day why he is not able to edit the default EULA that comes with the portal installation. Note: these are random texts (as shown below) and customer wants to go-live, thus he needs to modify the EULA proper.




He also created a new EULA and tried to change the default EULA to this new one. But he was not allowed to do so.



Bug with the product? No.


We found out that he has already created applications and assigned some APIs to these applications. Now, when a consumer adds an API to his/her application, he will be prompted to accept the Terms and Conditions as stipulated in the EULA.

Once accepted, from an audit point of view, this particular EULA shall not be changed by another party. As such, CA API Developer Portal implements this "disabled" function.

I think this is a great feature. It covers the benefits of both parties - API Publishers and API Consumers.

I have seen other software vendor asking customers to sign a paper-form EULA. But within the EULA, it points to a hyperlink with more terms and conditions. In one case, a contract was signed in year 2016. In Sep 2017, customer went to the site and realized the terms and conditions had been updated (latest modified date was May 2017) without notice.

This is bad practice!


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