Kaner, however, emphasizes that the practice essentially requires companies to purchase multiple competing software packages simply to compare terms. This severely limits competition over important terms, including support and warranties.

The committee also voted down efforts to require that terms at least be provided prior to online sales. The rationale was that this would unfairly single out the software industry and pose too great a burden on online merchants--especially since some merchants sell thousands of titles, some packages involve multiple licenses, and some publishers attach different software terms to different markets or even different product versions.

Of course, another perspective is that sorting out these problems could reduce the games publishers play with varying license terms and make it more likely users would abide by the more understandable, streamlined terms.

Worshipping at the Bug Shrine
Detractors also argue that 2B's damage limitations encourage today's first-to-market-at-any-cost software mentality. Watts Humphrey, who in the late 1960s headed the IBM software team that introduced the first software license, says he opposes 2B's efforts "to protect manufacturers from customers [hurt] by product defects."

That's because he's convinced that it's already possible to curb software error dramatically--but publishers won't push for higher standards in a market that rewards quick production, and refuses to punish those who cause harm.

As a fellow for Carnegie Mellon University's federally funded Software Engineering Institute, Humphrey is now dedicated to processes designed to improve software quality from inception. Humphrey says it takes time to learn new methods, but a team trained in the new methods can cut errors in comparable software to 56 from 1,700. He believes that by using quality procedures over the entire course of development, for example, Microsoft have eliminated many of the 30,000 errors it later found in testing Windows NT.

The big problem Humphrey sees is that software is quickly moving into cars, planes and other goods that cannot simply be rebooted every time software crashes. His concern is that "2B will enshrine the defective nature of software in the laws of the 50 states."

Stephen Y. Chow, a drafting committee member who helped kick off software licensing efforts that led to 2B more than a decade ago, says he now considers himself the committee dissident. He believes the process has been driven primarily by mass-market software publishers, who until recently dominated the debate. Chow says many consider "this industry segment's intransigence and arrogance" as the reason for the draft's imbalance.

He says he expects that once 2B moves outside the committee setting, NCCUSL will include at least a few more business and consumer safeguards, and may even address how disclaimers of warranty should be treated when software introduces viruses.