Working for a company that creates content playable in the flash player, I've been interested in seeing what comes of Microsoft's competing Silverlight. As of yet I haven't found any reason to install it. Nothing I have looked at requires silverlight. However today, lifehacker.com had a posting about Tafiti. Tafiti is a new search engine from Microsoft based on Silverlight. Once I went to the website it said

By clicking Get Microsoft Silverlight you accept the Silverlight license agreement.

Since the license was so prominent I decided to click on it. ...

The first thing I noticed as I read was this statement:

INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS. You may install and use any number of copies of the software only with the browser and operating system software named above.

If you look, Opera is not one of the software named above. Neither is Safari, yet safari is listed in the Mac license agreement which also doesn't have Opera listed.

The next thing I saw that was pretty humorous, even though it is probably standard, was:

You may not work around any technical limitations in the software;

So when it has limitations ( which all software does ) we should just sit tight and wait for Microsoft to improve it. Somehow I don't think people will follow this, they don't seem to do it anywhere else.

Then in the license came their difference on updating their player.

This software contains an Automatic Update feature that is on by default. Microsoft may change or cancel it at any time. For more information about this feature, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=87026. You may turn off this feature while the software is running (“opt-out”).

Classic Microsoft automatic update type of mechanism. Probably a good thing for many lay people out there who don't want to interact any way with there computer but I find it annoying. I prefer the Flash express update method better, as I can choose to install the update as needed if necessary ( of course I always have the latest player because of work ).

Even though this software is as-is and really doesn't have any sort of guarantee or warranty they let you know that you do have some recourse

You can recover from Microsoft and its suppliers only direct damages up to U.S. $5.00. You cannot recover any other damages, including consequential, lost profits, special, indirect or incidental damages.

That's right, you can get $5.00 in direct damages. That's awesome. You can buy your lawyer a value meal, but you can't super size it.

Anyway, this is the first license agreement I have actually read through in its entirety ( it is pretty short ), and I thought other people might find these things interesting. I'm just wondering if I should live on the edge and attempt to install silverlight in Opera or on a linux system. That's about all the sticking it to the man I think I can come up with ( other than not installing it at all ).

Silverlight Windows license agreement
Silverlight Mac License agreement
Since silverlight does not run on linux there is no linux license.