By the frequency of my answers to these sorts of questions, some might
assume I am in charge of (or do anything at all with) the legal agreement
process for the seeding program. My involvement is actually not much more
than being someone who repeatedly brings up the issues from the developer's
perspective, serving as an advocate where possible, and who occasionally
has lunch with the folks who do handle the agreements. Oh, and I also have
helped hammer out the agreements to be more appropriate for the situation
since I know the technical content of what they're covering.
My understanding is that if developers properly and accurately fill out the
paperwork as well as the form on the web site, the license sails through
and has no troubles. We have someone whose full-time job it is to do the
paperwork to process them - tons each day; I've seen the piles.
But when someone fills out the form with different information from what is
on the license, or fails to do one or the other, or doesn't bother giving
us any contact information, or things along those lines, well, obviously
there are process problems and those things take much longer - in some
cases we've no idea who sent in the agreement if there are blank fields or
unreadable writing, so we can't follow up at all!
Can we improve the process while still keeping it legally sufficient?
Possibly, and we're pushing hard on the lawyers to be creative. But
thousands of people have successfully gotten through it, and I think if
people take a normal amount of care to fill out the blanks and read the
instructions, there aren't any problems.
OK, back to writing 3.5 web pages.
-David Fedor
Palm Developer Support
