I was looking into GraffitySuite but some things came up that I’m not agreeing with:
There is no company information. Who am I dealing with, legally? At a price of up to $1000, I find it rather unprofessional (and, in parts of Europe, even illegal) to hide a business like this. (Finally found it: https://graffitisuite.com/legal/source-eula/)
Which brings me to another thing: The EULA reserves the right to terminate my license at any time, apparently without any reason. So, when I say bad things about the company, they’d be in their right to tell me not to use their product any more, even if I’ve properly paid for it, without compensation? Really? Is that even legal? Who conciously agrees to such an EULA?
How far does this go, even? I mean, if I follow every word of the EULA, I may even lose the right to continue to use it if I stop the yearly subscription fee. This is probably not intended, which suggests even more how bad the EULA is.
Or is it really meant this way: As long as I want to use any old version of the GraffitySuite software, I must pay a yearly license fee, and if I stop paying, I must delete the source code from all my projects?!? Please tell me that this isn’t what the EULA says, as that’d be terrible.
If you violate the EULA, yes. The EULA is designed to ensure that the source code is not shared where it’s not supposed to be, when it’s not supposed to be, and how it’s not supposed to be. That’s the basic tenet.
No. There are a few instances in the past where customers aired their grievances on these forums, the old RS forums, the RB Guru forums, and so on. I addressed them, and the majority of those developers are still customers to this day. I prefer customers open tickets so that I am notified and can respond as quickly as possible (average ticket creation to response time right now is 1.27 hours), but I have no issues with customers discussing my products in other mediums – if you want me to respond directly and quickly, tickets are the best way.
Again, if you aid in piracy of my work product, which is spelled out pretty clearly in the EULA, your subscription would be canceled and your license rescinded. This would be to cut off your ability to access and share my work product. Recently a developer was found to be reselling some of my products with minor modifications. Some changes were made to the EULA that may have been too aggressive, but I’m not reading the document the same way you are. Please feel free to email me any specifics that bother you at agcyphers@graffitisuite.com and I’d be happy to review the sections with you and, if necessary, provide you with a spoken/written exemption to specific items or alter the EULA with the help of my legal counsel to address your concerns adequately.
When your subscription expires, you lose access to updates and support. That’s all. You may continue to use any version of GraffitiSuite that was available while you were subscribed, but you are still bound by the EULA to not transmit or share GraffitiSuite in a non-binary format outside your organization or any other way that violates the EULA. The only real exception here is if you request a refund, which obviously revokes your license to use/possess GraffitiSuite releases made available during the time you were previously subscribed under that payment.
I hope I’ve answered all of your questions, and I’m happy to answer any others.
To address this:
I’m a one-man company. While I’ve been doing this for almost 16 years, I work from home. I don’t maintain an office space, or a phone line purely for customers. If a customer needs to talk on the phone, I setup a time for the customer to call and either provide my phone number or they give me theirs, as I have done many times. More often than not, technology and the target market being what they are, I use some form of VoIP for voice communication.
I use a P.O. Box to limit the availability of my home address due to request from my wife. I wouldn’t mind people just showing up at my door if it was just me, angry or not, but I have to consider her. You never know what people will do, or are capable of.
Yes, the site makes it look like a large company. This is marketing. This is meant to help bring in bigger businesses, and it works fairly well. I’ve gotten a number of customers who were shocked to find out it was just me after our interactions and always want to know how I manage it all. I’m just the man behind the curtain trying to pay the bills and keep developers happy. I hope you understand.
Boy, if that were possible, that’d be frightening. I’m pretty sure my wife would leave if there were more than one of me with even minor changes. She’d probably go mad and run screaming off in to the hills.
In Europe you need to have an imprint with a physical address. You can easily get a dissuasion (Abmahnung) if you don’t comply. Any company that doesn’t have an address looks unprofessional. It doesn’t matter if you are a one-person or a thousand-person shop.
I know that an Abmahnung is a legal warning taken by a competitor in Germany, but Im unable to locate any trade rules governing requirement of listing a physical address over a shared address for the EU as a whole or any individual country.
Despite personal feelings that a PO Box is unprofessional, can you point me to regulatory documents governing my obligations in regards to physical location as a foreign vendor?
[quote=435457:@Anthony Cyphers]I wonder if NASA is considered unprofessional and has received regulatory violations from EU countries.
[/quote]
There is an address at the bottom of the Contact page. Contact NASA
Ah, so your concern is over the imprint, which has not been settled as a matter of law in the country under which the link references, and makes no concrete distinction that I can find either on the page or in the cited codes as to whether the address should be physical or mailing. I’ll definitely create an imprint page if it makes people more comfortable, that’s easy.
@Paul Sondervan Yes, I was speaking more to the professionalism complaint of using a PO Box. I mean, it’s not like I’m forcing people to use Western Union over here.
OK, to satisfy the requirement I’ve added an “EU Business Information” page to the legal section of the site, a link in the contact section, and a link in the footer, available here: https://graffitisuite.com/legal/business-information/
I’ve also switched from a PO Box to using a numbered address.
To be clear, in my recent responses I was trying to inject a bit of humor here. I’ve been working for nearly 40 hours now and I may have failed. If so, I apologize.
most US government agencies use a PO Box for all their mail (aka physical address). When dealing on government contracts, that was shocking to me. every address they used excluding the delivery address (of physical items) was a PO Box. and if we referenced any other address for those addresses they government wouldnt go forward with the contract.
I know lots of businesses that use PO Boxes for their addresses even if they have hundreds of buildings they are in. buildings come and go, but the PO Box address remains the same.
