What's a EULA? Oh, just the licensing agreement you sign when you want to use some software. Chrome has one. And it sure sucks. From what Google says, they just tried to apply their existing EULA (that they use for other products) to Chrome. Not such a good idea. And here's the nugget - Chrome wants users to sell their souls over to Google and to provide them with a:
"perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content."
If Chrome really wants to be the desktop of the future, which I'm sure they do, how could they thoughtlessly attach this EULA to Chrome? Imagine Google using your desktop for whatever they wanted. Imagine having a document open in Chrome and now Google can take it? And use it for whatever they want. Or people, not me of course, looking at offensive material (uh, porn) online and Google exposing that?
While Google pulled that piece from their EULA yesterday, I think this speaks volumes about some tiny holes that are starting to open up in Google's armor. As with the release of their browser - which never would have happened at the Google I worked at, a EULA like this would never have been blindly attached to a product that is expected to have such a huge impact on the market.
Google needs to start paying attention to what has made them so great.
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