Sounds like standard terms from lawyers – not very friendly to customers, very friendly to company – but is it particularly bad here?
I remember when I was part of procuring an analytics tool for a previous employer and they had a similar clause that would essentially have banned us from building any in-house analytics while we were bound by that contract.
> Sounds like standard terms from lawyers – not very friendly to customers, very friendly to company – but is it particularly bad here?
Compilers don't come with terms that prevent you from building competing compilers. IDEs don't prevent you from writing competing IDEs. If coding agents are supposed to be how we do software engineering from now on, yeah, it's pretty bad.
Because they approach creating such terms in a different way? e.g. some competitors may consider the chances of it to be enforceable to be 0 and not bother with it at all, while others just didn't bother tweaking the standard boilerplate they got from their lawyers unless needed.
Literally the first 4 SaaS companies that came to my mind to check (Atlassian/Jira, Linear, Pipedrive, Stackblitz/Bolt.new) have a similar clause in their TOS.
I remember when I was part of procuring an analytics tool for a previous employer and they had a similar clause that would essentially have banned us from building any in-house analytics while we were bound by that contract.
We didn't sign.