Sparkle

Showing a license (EULA) when upgrading?

Asked by Gary Bernhardt

Our DMGs have a standard click-through EULA that the user must agree to when mounting the DMG. When doing an automatic update, Sparkle silently agrees to the EULA. Our lawyer insists that we need to have the user agree to the EULA on every update. Is there some easy way to show the EULA? My searches show that this doesn't seem to have been discussed here before.

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Andy Matuschak (andymatuschak) said : 		#1

Sorry, I decided a while ago that I wanted to avoid bugging users with those if at all possible. Other projects with EULAs have said that they're told it's okay so long as the EULA doesn't change between versions (since the user has already agreed to it). But of course, I am not a lawyer, and you should listen to yours.

I looked into trying to implement this, and unfortunately, I think it'll actually be rather difficult. You see, Apple doesn't provide any API for mounting dmgs, so I just run hdiutil from the command line. hdiutil (being a command line tool) displays the EULA in the command line and waits for input from STDIN. That obviously won't work.

Looks like you'd have to do this by intercepting the STDOUT from hdiutil and presenting the UI yourself (or encoding the EULA in your appcast). Alternately, you might be able to use Apple Events to tell Finder to mount the dmg, and then the EULA would get displayed graphically. But also Finder would do that thing where it opens a window for the DMG. And it would probably take focus. Tricky!

Sorry not to have been more helpful.

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Gary Bernhardt (gary-bernhardt) said : 		#2

Thanks for the quick and detailed response! I agree with your sentiments about not annoying the users. I'll talk to my lawyer about it again, making sure that he understands that we're talking about automatic updates, and see what he says. Thanks again, and thanks for all of your work on Sparkle.

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Gary Bernhardt (gary-bernhardt) said : 		#3

Just in case someone stumbles upon this with a similar problem...

After clarifying the situation to our lawyer, he says it's fine to automatically install updates without presenting the EULA to the user every time. (This is not legal advice! I just hate to leave things hanging. ;)