I have founded a small game development company in Canada and we are just ready to launch our first product (yay, now I can do some hurd hacking!). But I've run into a small legal problem with the company we work and this is the only free software list I am on. I hope somebody here can give me some advice.
We use eSellerate (a division of Mindvision, an American company) for our installation wizard. The reason we went with eSellerate is because it allows users to very conveniently purchase and upgrade to the full version from the demo. They can have the demo installed and then just click on a purchase button, give their billing info, and then automatically download/install the latest full version of the software. It works pretty slick. Unfortunately they only support Windows and Apple platforms, and I want to port our game to GNU/Linux (hey, maybe I can even be the first game for the hurd?). It seems I have two choices: I can either just put our products on the platforms they choose to support, or I can fill the void their chose to leave and write a free piece of software that offers similar functionality to their product. Since they don't support GNU/Linux and seem to have no intention of supporting it I had always assumed that I was going to be forced to write something like that. But today as I was about to sign the contract between our two companies I came across a point that could really hurt me: 10.b) Each party agrees not to: (i) disassemble, decompile, reverse engineer, or otherwise reduce to perceptible form the other's products, or otherwise attempt to learn the source code, structure, algorithms or ideas underlying any software; or (ii) take any action contrary to the applicable end user license agreement except as allowed under this Agreement. I don't want to decompile their software and I don't give a hoot about what algorithms they used. But I don't want to write something to install our product on GNU/Linux and have them coming back in three years (duration or contract) and saying "hey, we thought of making it convinient to install products first. You broke the contract because that is our an underlying idea of our software" Are there any lawyer types here who can tell me I don't need to worry or should get that changed? Jeff, you're in Vancouver right? Know any lawyers local affordable lawyers that I should see?