In his mail Mr. Staněk refers to GoodData’s Terms of Use which forbids to use their product for evaluation purposes, and informs us that “in the case that you will continue to use our service in conflict with the Terms of Use we will have to use the legal way to achieve removal of the above-mentioned articles” (see the full text of his mail below).
We at Start2Cloud strive for neutrality and objectivity and we are not aware of any incorrect conduct in respect to GoodData. I personally went again through all the articles we published about GoodData and haven’t found any breach of these two fundamental principles we accepted ourselves right at the beginning and before we launched our service.
We are however a small startup portal formed by students of University of Economics in Prague and me as their teacher, so we are well aware of our small chances against the $28.5 million backed company GoodData, if this really gets to a lawsuit. In such a case we will have to comply with the request of GoodData, which would most likely mean the end of our business, because we will be unable to continue in our mission of providing you with an unbiased and unrestricted description of cloud computing services - even though we are sure that we haven’t done anything wrong. As a matter of fact, this would be a sad precedent for any media that try to give their readers a leveled and unbiased comparison of products or services, being it on the cloud computing market, or any other.
Here is an extract of GoodData’s Terms of Use which Mr. Staněk refers to:
Terms of Use & Restrictions: GoodData hereby grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, worldwide right to use the Service, solely for your own internal business purposes, subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement. All rights not expressly granted to you are reserved by GoodData and its licensors. You may not access the Service if you are a direct competitor of GoodData, except with GoodData’s prior written consent. In addition, you may not access the Service for purposes of monitoring its availability, performance or functionality, or for any other benchmarking or competitive purposes.
Let us point out that these Terms are exceptionally restrictive. They don’t just forbid any media (like us) to test GoodData service and compare it with other services on the market, but in fact, they forbid even their potential customers to do so, because trying GoodData service and comparing it with their competitors (even for the purpose of deciding which one to use) could definitely be qualified as “accessing the Service for benchmarking or competitive purposes”.
We don’t think that legal restrictions like this one do anything good for the customer and - in effect - for the market as a whole. We believe that the best and only right way how to compete is to focus on the quality and value of the service, not to try to ban neutral subjects in their effort to provide unbiased information to their readers. Even if we are eventually pushed out of our business by legal means of a company that is stronger than us, we believe that we were in the right in our effort to bring you a leveled picture of the emerging cloud computing market.
We can now only hope in support of you - our readers - who may express their own opinion about this way of dealing with independent media by spreading this message further. We are afraid that this is the only chance of how our “David versus Goliath” battle could end other than by pushing us out of the business. We would very much like to continue providing you with our unbiased and unrestricted (and uncensored!) service of what the cloud computing market has to offer to small businesses. And it would be really great, because we have just started.
Prague, October 24th, 2011
Jiri Donat, Founder and CEO of Start2Cloud.com
Attachment:
Translation of email of Mr. Staněk, Founder and CEO of GoodData (press PgDn for its original Czech version):
from Roman Stanek roman@gooddata.com
sender-time Sent at 10:59 PM (GMT-07:00). Current time there: 4:59 AM. ✆
to peter.fedorocko@start2cloud.com, jiri.donat@start2cloud.com
date Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 10:59 PM
subject Articles about GoodData
Hello,
Articles start to appear on your web site Start2Cloud.com about the services provided by GoodData. I would like to draw your attention to the provisions of our terms of use which permits the use of our services exclusively for internal use (more at http://www.gooddata.com/terms-of-use), and explicitly prohibits use of our application for discovering its functionality without our permission.
I would like to hereby request removal of articles in which you evaluate the functionality of our services (for example http://www.start2cloud.com/gooddata-versus-birst.aspx, http://www.start2cloud.com/gooddata-vs-bime.aspx) and which infringes our Terms of Use.
In the case that you will continue to use our service in conflict with the Terms of Use we will have to use the legal way to achieve removal of the above-mentioned articles.
Sincerely,
-Roman Stanek
--
Roman Stanek
Founder, CEO
GoodData Corporation
Blog:http://roman.stanek.org
Twitter: romanstanek
(415) 886 7234
GoodData - the world's fastest growing BI platform
The original text ot Mr. Staněk’s email in Czech language:
-------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Roman Stanek <roman@gooddata.com>
Date: 2011/10/21
Subject: Clanky o GoodData
To: peter.fedorocko@start2cloud.com, jiri.donat@start2cloud.com
Dobry den,
Na vasem webustar2cloud.com se objevuji clanky o sluzbe poskytovane firmou GoodData. Rad bych vas upozornil na ustanoveni nasich terms of use ktere umoznuje pouziti nasi sluzby vyhradne na interni pouziti (vice http://www.gooddata.com/terms-of-use ) a vyslovne zakazuje poziti pro zjistovani funkcionality bez naseho povoleni.
Chtel bych Vas timto pozadat o odstraneni clanku ve kterych hodnotite funkcionalitu nasi sluzby (naprikladhttp://www.start2cloud.com/gooddata-versus-birst.aspx,http://www.start2cloud.com/gooddata-vs-bime.aspx) a kterymi porusujete nase Terms of Use.
V pripade, ze budete nasi sluzbu nadale pouzivat v rozporu s Terms of Use budeme muset pouzit soudni cestu k odstraneni vyse zminenych clanku.
S pozdravem,
-Roman Stanek
--
Roman Stanek
Founder, CEO
GoodData Corporation
Blog:http://roman.stanek.org
Twitter: romanstanek
(415) 886 7234
GoodData - the world's fastest growing BI platform