Why not have it as part of the download instead of the software itself i.e.
make it an HTML page that they have to pass through to actually download it.
Scott
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of
Tolkin, Steve
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2001 11:05 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [Boston.pm] How to ensure user sees and agrees to a license
(Also posted to comp.lang.perl.moderated)
My company has given me permission to distribute a perl program to
some people outside the company. It is not open source,
but it is our first step in that direction.
The text of the "license" is standard boilerplate, as modified
slightly by the company lawyer, e.g.
# THIS SOFTWARE CARRIES NO WARRANTY, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED. THE USER
# ASSUMES ALL RISKS, KNOWN OR UNKNOWN, DIRECT OR INDIRECT, ... etc.
The question is, how can we ensure that the user of the software
sees this text, and agrees to it?
One idea is to print this text out the first time the program is run.
The program would then prompt the user to agree and if he did would
save a file somewhere, e.g. in $HOME or maybe in the current
directory. Subsequent runs would find this file and suppress the
prompt. There are various things that can go wrong here, e.g. not
being able to write the file to that directory.
Are there any better ways to do this?
Is there some code I could reuse to handle the prompting, etc.
I suspect that most users will be running this in a DOS box (aka
command window) on Windows NT. One problem is that the text is more
than 25 lines, and so the top would scroll off the screen. I think I
could expect most users will have the 'type' and 'more' commands but I
do not really want to start another process. I assume there is some
way to display this in my perl program itself, about 20 lines at a
time, and then get the user to press the Y key. But I do not want to
write all that code, it being outside the realm of my experience.
(Almost all my perl is server side with no user interface at all.)
Right now the program is a single file. Maybe the license should be
shown as part of the "install" process. But then an install program
would need to be written.
Another approach might be to always write to stderr a one line message
reminding users that they agree to the license, which they can see the
full text of by entering the --license option. (I use Getopt::Long so
this could be abbreviated down to -l.) Even this one line message
could be suppressed if the user provided e.g. the --agree option.
Any other ideas, and code snippets, would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Steve
--
Steven Tolkin [EMAIL PROTECTED] 617-563-0516
Fidelity Investments 82 Devonshire St. R24D Boston MA 02109
There is nothing so practical as a good theory. Comments are by me,
not Fidelity Investments, its subsidiaries or affiliates.
