Terms of Service - Help

Help
1

I am referring to Terms of Service - Graphviz
Under Your Content:
"Nothing in these terms gives the company any ownership rights in intellectual property that you share with the forum, such as your account information, posts, or other content you submit to the forum. Nothing in these terms gives you any ownership rights in the company’s intellectual property, either.

Between you and the company, you remain solely responsible for content you submit to the forum. You agree not to wrongly imply that content you submit to the forum is sponsored or approved by the company. These terms do not obligate the company to store, maintain, or provide copies of content you submit, and to change it, according to these terms.

Content you submit to the forum belongs to you, and you decide what permission to give others for it. But at a minimum, you license the company to provide content that you submit to the forum to other users of the forum. That special license allows the company to copy, publish, and analyze content you submit to the forum.

When content you submit is removed from the forum, whether by you or by the company, the company’s special license ends when the last copy disappears from the company’s backups, caches, and other systems. Other licenses you apply to content you submit, such as Creative Commons licenses, may continue after your content is removed. Those licenses may give others, or the company itself, the right to share your content through the forum again.

Others who receive content you submit to the forum may violate the terms on which you license your content. You agree that the company will not be liable to you for those violations or their consequences."

Can someone help clarify the highlighted ones above?
The content we make is accessible to others. Is the content confidential or involves any IP? Will there be any kind of third-party licenses that we use to develop the content in this? What impact does the violation have on an entity who is officially approving Graphviz for use?

2

I’m not sure I understand your questions fully, but are you aware you are reading the terms of service of the forum, rather than for using Graphviz software?

These forum terms are mostly because we need to show your posts to other users. Thats how a forum works.

You can use Graphviz without using the Graphviz forum. Your use of Graphviz is constrained by the Graphviz license at
https://graphviz.org/license/. An organisation approving use of graphviz should look here.

3

Hi Mark, since Graphviz is an open source, our Legal team wants to make sure we fully understand the terms of service and we noticed some language that needs more clarification specifically on the items I highlighted. Our users may / may not join the forum but I dont think we can control it but if we do understand how things work as outlined in terms of service, we will be in a much better shape to approve this software for use within the organization.

4

You are looking at the terms of service for the wrong thing - the forum.

If you want to use the software within your org, you should look at the software license.

Graphviz software itself doesn’t have terms of service, it has a license.

5

Understood thank you.