John, I recommend your product too because it's the best, or at least among the best,
of it's type, and the price is much more reasonable than the other software in it's class.
Up until about 18 months ago or so I was telling people what good guys there
were over at Too Much Media. When we needed to write a custom set up for someone that ended up being similar to a junior version of NATS, I decided not to release it as a
standard product just because I didn't want to compete with the fine gentlemen who do NATS.
When another developer initially told me that he had some intellectual property concerns
about one of your other products and he was all pissed off at you, I suggested to him that
IF one of your coders had in fact done something wrong, it may have been without
your knowledge. I told him that he should give you the benefit of the doubt and assume
for the time being that you wouldn't approve of any wrongdoing if you had known about it.
Since I mentioned that, let me be very clear about one point - I do NOT know if his
concerns have any merit. It is certainly possible that noone at Too Much Media did
anything wrong regarding the other software. Whoever was coding for TMM could have
come up with some of the same design features and wording without ever having seen
the other CMS that it resembles. I just want to be very clear that I'm NOT making any
accusation regarding TMM and any other company's product - the point is that when a
concern was expressed I told people that John didn't seem like the kind of guy to do that.
That's why I wanted to talk to you - because I was going on the assumption that you
wouldn't approve of anything that even created the APPEARANCE of impropriety,
so I wanted to talk to you directly and let you know about what your employee had told
us when he asked for the privileged information, what we gave him, and what it appeared
he had done with it, believing that you would check it out and do the right thing.
I encouraged the other developer to also contact you directly with his concerns, believing
that you would do the right by him as well.
I don't dislike you, though it is very frustrating to have your employees contacting me
repeatedly asking for information but as soon as SPARTA was released and I needed to
talk to you no one would answer phone, email, or ICQ. If you tell me that you didn't get
the voice mails or emails I'm willing to take you at your word. If you tell me that you
didn't see any of my posts on the message boards saying that I needed to talk to you
about copyright issues I'll trust you on that too. You personally have never given me any
reason to distrust you, though obviously I won't be giving your developers any more inside
information!
My hope was that IF it turned out that there were indeed copyright or patent problems
with SPARTA we could work out a mutually beneficial arrangement, either a license deal
or we could cut you a really good referral deal so you would make good money recommending Strongbox.
You're generally a smart business man and as I say I have no reason to distrust you
if you personally tell me something, so I figured we could come up with something that
would let us together provide the best combination of technologies to webmasters and
work out very well for both companies. (The very public Naked Rhino fiasco notwithstanding.)
I'm sorry if any of the ideas I mentioned in my post were not correct.
As I clearly stated, these were the
assumptions I came to based on the information I had.
As I mentioned in my post, I haven't heard anything from you, so I don't know your
reasons for doing anything that you've done. When it appeared that you were focusing on
your excellent flagship product NATS rather than focusing on your two new products,
my assumption was that you had been busy dealing with the law suit that you
were dealing with and I thought it logical to assume that you weren't in the mood for
another legal fight with other companies regarding both CARMA and SPARTA. Again
I apologize if I was wrong about that. If you or anyone else at Too Much Media would
like to set me straight I'd be more than willing to listen to the facts as you know them.
I shouldn't have said anything at all about what you are doing or why you may be doing it,
and will try to refrain from doing so in the future, but still if I'm wrong about something and
you want to tell me what's really going on please feel free to contact me at
[email protected].
Other than that I'll try to keep my mouth shut about you. Just please get in touch with either
myself or if you prefer my lawyer before you really promote SPARTA so that we don't
have to get into a big ugly fight that costs us both money.