I was just about to order a Fairphone and discovered both the License Aggrement for the binary blobs and this thread afterwards. I wonder if it is even legal to force a customer to aggree to license that claims to make the seller able to force you to delete the drivers on your phone and thus basically make it unusable after it has become your property.
Really bad thing, basically a curse…
This Agreement applies from the first date you download the Software and
you may terminate it at any time by permanently destroying, the
Software, all backup copies, and all related materials. This Agreement
can be terminated in writing by Fairphone, at any time, without prior
notice. Upon termination, you must destroy the Software, all backup
copies, and all related material.
I guess it just a standard text that Google sends around for Android. But I never got an official answer on this. I’m not sure if this text was even ever read by a lawyer. Fun fact: code.fairphone is not even including the google services, it’s just plain Android. So they protect the “IP” of the OEMs and not so much Google.
I read through the entire thread but still not sure if I get this right:
Is this special license term I cited above only for installing Fairphone OS myself and I could thereby order a Fairphone and would not be “bound” to this term as long as I do not switch to Fairphone OS (but remove Google Services manually?)? As, to me it means Fairphone (respectively the OEM behind) can permanently disable my 500€ phone whenever they want by disallowing me to use those, sadly neccessary, binary blobs.
Did you ever read EULAs from different manufacturers? Everybody reserves the right to withdraw the license. What they won’t do, because it would render the product useless and land them in court, I could imagine. Same thing by the way if you buy DRM protected media. Here this happens all the time
I usually don’t buy any DRM protected media, so I never got in touch with such licenses I guess.
I think they definitely would withdraw the license, else there would be no reason why they should add this paragraph to the license.
So this license is the same when I just buy a Fairphone but don’t change to Fairphone OS?
And really, how could I ever sue them if what they did is actually covered by a EULA i aggreed to. Not mentioning I might not be able to cover the financial risk of sueing a big company in another country…
I would think that the license is in place, regardless of what (Fairphone provided) OS you have on your phone. But IANAL.
I don’t think they are planning to withdraw that license, as this template is in place in lots of comparable EULAs. They might get a too big a backlash doing this.
And yes, on person probably would not be able to sufficiently sue them, but then, many would be able (think Verbraucherschutz in Germany)…
But still, I think this is very hypothetical, and yes, I don’t like that EULA not at all and maybe not fitting for a product of a company called “FairPhone”… But who knows what happened in the background to be able to use that particular hardware and software(-blobs)
It would be nice to know. Wasn’t one of the reasons for the whole FP project to get some more transparency into the inner dealings of the whole phone business? I think it would be interesting to understand where this text comes from. Because these licences also drive what kind of other hardware/software is chosen.
I still think this is a Google “catch it all” text for “nothing is allowed” to make the different manufacturers happy and work together.
But does it make sense? No.
I’m still interested to figure out how Mozilla managed to get a bin-blob free build.
