/personal

Four and half months with our new Dell server, and the motherboard blew out. One business day warrany combined with some bad timing meant all our sites were offline for over 50 hours since Tuesday.

I certainly hope five months is not the expected lifetime of a Dell motherboard, or we will have a pretty expensive server in our hands. The good thing is though that the machine is running again.

While investigating the license of SpringGraph for a client Flex project, I came across the following snippet. Mind you, this is from the license for a library distributed as source code:

Licensee shall not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software.

As defined by Adobe in the same license agreement, Software means the files, libraries, and executables including all Documentation and other materials provided by Adobe to Licensee under this Agreement.

How seriously should I take such a contradictory license agreement? Is there any way such an agreement could be enforceable? After all, distributing source code with a license that prohibits viewing the source code is rather dim, isn’t it?