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Comment by drej | Hacker News Reader

This piece of software is superb. It's lightning fast, the UI is so easy to use, in terms of productivity it's super nice (small things like "copy as an insert statement").

It has been my daily driver for months now, but only for personal projects. I tried to get a license at work, but our lawyer said their EULA is a no-go :(

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Can you elaborate on what it was about the EULA that was a problem?

> TablePlus may, in its sole discretion, at any time and for any or no reason, suspend or terminate this Agreement with or without prior notice.

> Without limiting the foregoing, neither TablePlus nor any TablePlus’s provider makes any representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied: (i) as to the operation or availability of the Application, or the information, content, and materials or products included thereon; (ii) that the Application will be uninterrupted or error-free; (iii) as to the accuracy, reliability, or currency of any information or content provided through the Application; or (iv) that the Application, its servers, the content, or e-mails sent from or on behalf of TablePlus are free of viruses, scripts, trojan horses, worms, malware, timebombs or other harmful components.

Especially the last point in the second excerpt was the issue.

I'm shocked your lawyers had an issue with a company stating they don't want to be held liable if they're somehow hacked and start sending out malware.

Seems pretty standard to me.

So Equifax shouldn't be held liable for the leak of personal data?

Are we going to sit around here and pretend they were?

That is a little concerning. They are explicitly refusing to say the software is not a trojan.

It would make me think twice about using it.

I'd say it's a protection in case of their servers being breached and you downloading a malicious version of the application.

No court on earth would support them if it attempted to exfiltrate all of your data.

AKA the CCleaner clause. Did Piriform get sued over that incident?

Although as TablePlus worded it, it comes across like they want to be able to intentionally add malware to their software and get away with it. I'm no lawyer so I'm not sure how feasible it would be to add a "due to circumstances outside our control" subclause of some kind.

> Did Piriform get sued over that incident?

They're still installing software with CCleaner without user consent see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCleaner#Installing_bundled_so...

Wow. Is that common? It seems a little unusual to explicitly call these things out. But I can't say a typically read a lot of EULAs, either, so I don't know.

IANAL but I really don’t see anything problematic here, it’s all standard boilerplate digitally distributed software stuff. Maybe he thought the ownership clause was a little too broad?

https://tableplus.io/blog/2018/01/license-agreement.html

My wife is an attorney and if there is ONE thing she wishes she could make everyone understand it's that there is no such thing as a "standard" or "boilerplate" legal document.

Ofcourse there is; multiple times have I gotten documents via-via that were identical to docs I received before and the lawyers billed hours for that copy/paste work making it sound, like your wife, that it is custom and a lot of work. It can be Ofcourse, but most, even complex company documents I have signed (and that's 100s) are indeed boilerplate and the lawyers are scammers trying to bill hours for 'writing' them. If they would say '$1000 - boilerplate document (c) OurFirm' that would be fine, but making out it took days to make while it is exactly boilerplate/template with changed names is what all lawyers (at least the Corp ones we deal with) do (and they also spend > 1 week delivering these templates because 'so much work') but it is a scam imho. Akin to me selling a software application and charging all buyers 1000 hours and deliver it after 2 months instead of a license and an immediate download.

Obviously ymmv and I might have just encountered crappy ones, but 100s of signed legal docs in my career from at least 30 different lawyers show me that actually 95% is boilerplate of the docs we get.

But you're just proving my point: if 95% is boilerplate, 5% is not. Plus you have to consider the circumstances. The same exact document might have vastly different ramifications depending on what else is involved - the work, product, other parties, etc.

I'm very happy for folks who haven't run into issues by not using a lawyer. But having had documents reviewed and realizing that things are pretty much never what they appear on the surface to a layman, I would never consider signing a legal document without having it reviewed by a lawyer. Nor would I assume some "boilerplate" document is going to cover what I, as a non-lawyer, assume it will.

I did not mean that of the documents 5% of every document was custom: I mean that of the say 100 docs I signed, 5 were not just standard out of the drawer with only the parties changed.

Disclaimer here is that I am not from the US and as I understand legal things are different there: many things were you get sued over in the Netherlands where the contracts could be an issue in the US, are basically laughed out of court here in NL. Anecdotal; someone tried to sue us for damages because there was a misspelling in a contract with him. The judge told him literally to not waste his time as the intention was clear. Also indirect damages are not taken very seriously here (and should be nowhere imho, but I hear they are in the US).

So I only made my comment based on my experience in NL, DE, HK, ES and UK and there I mostly saw copy/paste work while still being billed hours for that non-effort.

Ah, very good point. It would certainly be great if things were that straight forward in the US.

Well, that's also hardly in her best interests now is it? Not really a partial judge (hah).

> neither TablePlus nor any TablePlus’s provider makes any representation or warranty of any kind, express or implied: ... that the Application, its servers, the content, or e-mails sent from or on behalf of TablePlus are free of viruses, scripts, trojan horses, worms, malware, timebombs or other harmful components.

Is that really standard boilerplate? I don't recall seeing a clause like that before.

I mean, again I'm not a lawyer and I don't spend time reading EULAs, but to me that seems like a pretty uninteresting hold-harmless agreement that happens to specify the harms from getting hacked and distributing malware, like what happened to Transmission and Piriform.

>It's lightning fast

I think this depends on the database rather than the software itself.

I'm not talking about database queries, I'm talking about working within the UI. If you compare it to Navicat or any of the Java-based apps, TablePlus is really quite fast.

I've just compared TablePlus to PGAdmin (the new web one), on a fast query which returns 1000 rows. The responsiveness of TP is really noticable

yep, compared to SQL management studio as well the difference is night and day.

I disagree.

Toad for example is really slow, but a lot of that is the design of the software itself (e.g. autocompleting the same thing twice is still slow the second time, because they don't do basic cache or predictive lookups).

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