What legal disclaimer do you use?

Question

I'm working on some code at the moment, but I was wondering what legal disclaimers you have? This is for some work that I'm providing to a friend for free.

This isn't open source since there's competitive advantage in the internal workings of the program.

I was thinking of something like:

Copyright 2008 Egwor.com
All rights reserved.

Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

What do you use?

Answer 1

Funnily enough, I found an EULA generator that could make you have an idea of the kind of verbiage you need: http://www.williampolito.com/central/utilities/central_eula/

This is however much longer that what you pasted here.

(don't obviously copy paste it without tweaking it first)

Answer 2

Look at the GNU General Public License - it has a disclaimer of warranty clause and a limitation of liability clause. Look at the (modified, no-advertising clause) BSD license too. In fact, look at most of the Open Source licences at OpenSource.org. Finally, don't forget to worry about which jurisdiction(s) you are subject to, which may alter the licencing and disclaimer terms available to you. (Some licences contain words about 'except where not legally permitted', for example. They tend to be longer than those that don't.)

In general, use a standard licence or licence template -- do not invent your own. And, in case of doubt, consult a lawyer.

IANAL: I am not a lawyer.

Added: Even though you say you are writing commercial software, you can still look at open source disclaimers. You could, of course, also look at commercial licences and their disclaimers. But you would probably be well advised to discuss the issues with a lawyer; if you are making money out of your software, people disgruntled with it are more likely to sue you.