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by laurent92 2139 days ago
> performance

By Atlassian’s ToS, you are not allowed to « comment on the performance of the products ». I know no-one thinks this would be enforced here, but I just want to highlight that it doesn’t help a company to improve if they know they can just lawyer-up a problem away and avoid benchmarks and being compared on that topic.

8 comments

This is from Atlassian's ToS

(d) incorporate any Cloud Products into a product or service you provide to a third party;

does this mean that I can't integrate JIRA into a ticket tracking workflow that I build for my product with IFTTT that creates a new ticket when someone sends an email to a support alias?

(e) interfere with or otherwise circumvent mechanisms in the Cloud Products intended to limit your use;

(f) reverse engineer, disassemble, decompile, translate or otherwise seek to obtain or derive the source code, underlying ideas, algorithms, file formats or non-public APIs to any Cloud Products, except to the extent expressly permitted by applicable law (and then only upon advance notice to us);

(g) remove or obscure any proprietary or other notices contained in any Cloud Product;

Fair enough.

(h) use the Cloud Products for competitive analysis or to build competitive products;

Sure, I mean this is hard to enforce but if the team at Trello was using JIRA while making Trello, Atlassian could just say "hey - stop, no like".

(i) publicly disseminate information regarding the performance of the Cloud Products;

Seriously? I really didn't believe when I saw parent say you are not allowed to comment on performance of the product but I stand corrected. I will not comment on performance of any Atlassian product ever, ever ever. You got me Atlassian, this is what I get for not reading ToS before clicking Accept.

(j) encourage or assist any third party to do any of the foregoing.

Ok.

[0] https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service

Wow, that's as dumb as clauses get.

I'll try to get the legal team on it. It's a landmine as even a casual discussion of performance voids the license. Any discussion of outage may or may not involve this point.

It is a devops prevention clause.

> even a casual discussion of performance voids the license

Of course, that assumes such terms are enforceable. But, even if not, just having them in there is just so odious as to make one seek out other solutions.

Oh of course performance matters. But privacy? Atlassian's privacy policy is even worse.
Does that mean hackernews could be sued by Jira for allowing this thread to stay up (assuming they use Jira internally and signed the ToS)?
Do they define performance? This suggests you aren't supposed to discuss the Cloud Products with anyone. Can imagine if everyone follows this it won't be good for Word of mouth
That rubs me so much the wrong way.

If they ever terminated services for me because I commented on performance I would be the most loud person on the internet about it.

I would go to every review site, every comment board, and filter every title on every news aggregator and post as much statistics as I could about performance and issues that I had with it. Then I would state that they had terminated my services for commenting about it, with the proof.

I would be totally radicalised against them, it's absolutely insane that they even have this as a ToS, but if they ever enforced it I'm sure many people would salt the fucking earth.

I wonder why there's no clause forbidding to discuss the shortcomings of the ToS itself
These "Oracle clauses" really, really put me off using a product, or indeed anything from an organisation.

I totally understand that benchmarking is hard, but using legal means to silence anyone from talking about aspects of your product is just downright scummy.

Haha, in addition to all the BS in their terms of service, I had a delightful experience the other day where they argued tooth and nail that they aren't subject to CCPA deletion requests if they give your username away, and at this point I've just been stonewalled.

Just speculating, I bet they've decided a lawsuit would be cheaper than figuring out how their spaghetti code works to be able to safely delete a few fields.

Ha, this just reminded me that back in... 2009 or 2010, I tweeted something about being frustrated with JIRA and within an hour I had a message from someone at Atlassian warning me that I was in violation. I think I deleted the tweet, I wish I could go back and revisit it.
I've never agree to Atlassians terms of service, so I feel free to comment all I want. (Edit: I guess I don't use their cloud product, my employers stuff is all self-hosted, so maybe those terms don't even apply?)
source?
Wow, that sounds like the most communist thing I've ever read in a ToS
Broad ToSs and zero consumer rights are full laissez faire capitalism. So I would argue this is the most capitalist thing in a ToS.
Probably because you have absolutely no idea about what communism is.