| I'm fairly sure this may fail muster as the only reason the one signature contract by the company to you is generally well tolerated is because it is unequivocally clear what your "consideration", (or what you get out of the arrangement) is in fact, and that by your acceptance, you state you are satisfied. In the case of software, that being access to the software itself in the form intended by the writer of the boilerplate contract. It is not so clear that when you unilaterally cross things out, screenshot that altered document, then click accept that those terms are then binding on the counterparty since they have not had the opportunity to also stipulate or modify their terms (define their consideration) in light of your changes. Legally speaking, there is nothing wrong with asking for different terms from the boilerplate, but economically and practically there is. It does single you out as a desirable client to fire. In the end, it's not the legal construct of a contract that is the problem. It's that the market has widely deemed it acceptable to only automate or implement the first stage of it. To offer an illustration of what should actually be done software-wise (super-ideal case); You offer a short demo of the core value add, get passed the courtship phase and down to brass tacks. You are offered the boilerplate agreement with an option to accept as is, decline, or accept with modifications. Upon accepting with modifications, you are given a text entry box, and a helpful DSL to reference clauses you wish to change or strike. You utilize that, and click a confirmation button to send a message to a legally authorized representative of the vendor, who then formulates their consideration, and presents it back to you, repeat until everyone is happy. Then you open the software and do your thing. It should be quite evident why no one (given the economic optimization function) has converged on that solution. It's way easier to just put enough in to defend you as a company in the boilerplate and rely on most people being unconditional to actual challenge your term offerings. That works absurdly well, and until it doesn't, I don't see a great opportunity for migration from the status quo to that. You might get slow adoption of that ideal workflow, but it will have to be paired with a better bottom line for service providers, otherwise they won't even bother to offer the actually legally complete communication channel as a first-class process. |