20 June 2010 - eighty licenses

I recently updated a piece of free software that happens to have a plug-in architecture, and it popped up a box asking me to agree to eighty separate software licenses. I took the time to count them. Obviously the process should be automated; the licences should be machine-readable, and the computer can agree to them for me. Then I have to comply with the licenses, which will involve a certain amount of following orders, but the orders ultimately come from people and the computer is only an intermediary, right? When the robot apocalypse comes, we won’t notice at first that anything has changed.