For Vendors, Silence Is GoldenFor Vendors, Silence Is Golden

You may not know it, but a surprisingly large number of software vendors have license provisions that can prohibit you from communicating with your peers about the performance, usability, reliability, trustworthiness, downtime, and security of the software you depend on to manage your business.

Some vendors have used these software license provisions to file or threaten lawsuits to silence users who criticized software quality in places such as Web sites, Usenet newsgroups, user group bulletin boards, and the technical support boards maintained by software vendors themselves. We want to know if your vendor's software license requires your silence on the issue of quality and what you think about that.

We also want to know if a software vendor has warned you to stop communicating your experience with its products. Let us know if you've been warned to take down a Web site on which software users discuss the software they use. Let us know if your news group postings have been blocked because you complained about buggy software. Has your user group been threatened because members complain about features that don't work as advertised? Has the vendor's sales rep complained because you went public? If so, we'd like to hear about it.

Let us know at the following phone numbers and E-mail addresses. We'll contact you for a story about software licenses that attempt to silence unhappy users.

Jennifer Maselli, 516-562-7052, [email protected]

Steve Konicki, 305-408-5024, [email protected]