This reminds me of a piece of proprietary software called
Miserware. The original license said you needed permission to publish data reported by Miserware. After some rumblings, they issued this e-mail:
Dear MicroMiser beta participant,
Thank you for your involvement in the MicroMiser beta! The response so far has been tremendous and well beyond our expectations. The information we are getting when you run the mw-feedback script is really helping us improve our products and documentation.
The license you agreed to when registering for the beta said you needed permission from MiserWare to publish data reported by our software. We would like to lift this requirement to some extent by allowing you to share performance and power numbers reported by MicroMiser. More precisely our lawyers told us to say it like this:
"You are hereby authorized to disclose information regarding the performance of the MicroMiser software, provided that such information is provided to you in a MicroMiser software report."
This includes any information (including energy savings information) provided by MicroMiser in any of its log files and/or information reported in tools such as the mw-feedback script which reports system specific information to MiserWare thereby aiding future development and earning you points in the incentive program.
Several folks have asked about benchmarking against other power management software. With regard to benchmarking, we want to clarify the intent of the license. Our intent was not to preclude benchmarking altogether, but to ensure the measurement methodology is fair to all parties. More precisely, our lawyers told us to paste both permissions together:
"You are hereby authorized to disclose information regarding the performance of the MicroMiser software, (i) provided that such information is provided to you in a MicroMiser software report, or (ii) provided that such information is obtained using techniques approved in writing by MiserWare."
There is no need for you to sign another license agreement as these clarifications simply give you additional permissions under the original license.
These clarifications are the result of your feedback. Please continue to send your comments to feedback@miserware.com . We promise to keep listening.
Regards,
MiserWare
Good thing they have lawyers, huh? Needless to say, I thought about it for a millisecond, and realized I could live without this particular piece of software.