License clickthrough recording
November 23, 2007
Recording is really the word I was looking for, but I can’t think of a better one yet. What I’m wondering here is why recording/storing the act of a clickthrough license acceptance isn’t something built in to Windows or OSX (on Linux I guess I can understand why, as the culture likely wouldn’t accept it).
Most software gets installed in Windows or OSX via some standard installation mechanisms. “Installing” in OSX might be somewhat a misnomer, as I believe it’s often just copied, without any ‘registration’ of the process with a central registry ala Windows. So perhaps this idea would only work in the Windows ecosystem.
The main idea is to log the text of whatever ‘click through’ license was accepted during the installation of each program. That would need to be some sort of OS-level call that installers could call, and I guess there would need to be a certain level of trust that the license shown the user is also the same one stored in the registry.
My thinking here is that it would address the issue of people in companies installing random applications. This would give the part-time sysadmin the ability to audit not just the apps installed, but also the terms the user agreed to and theoretically bound the company to. Completely locking people’s machines down is an option as well, but depending on the situation and resources, isn’t really a good option. For larger companies, the Software Update Server is used to push out new software to people’s desktops, so presumably the syadmins in those cases have reviewed the licenses and understand them and keep a record of them.
Is this a crazy or pointless idea? Has it been done and I’m not aware of it?
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