(End User License Agreement) The legal agreement between the manufacturer and purchaser of software. It is either printed somewhere on the packaging or displayed on screen at time of installation, the latter being the better method, because it cannot be avoided. The user must click "Accept" or "I Agree" and the license does stipulate the terms of usage, whether the user reads them or not.
The license disclaims all liabilities for what might happen in the user's computer when the software is running. It generally guarantees nothing except that the disk will be replaced if defective. If it sounds like a license to get away with making inferior software, one has to consider that it is impossible for even the largest vendor to test a program in every possible configuration in the PC world. Some combination of hardware failure and/or software bug can always cause a program to crash and cause the loss of whatever data are in the machine at that time. See
clickwrap,
concurrent use license and
per seat license.
