Hype Vaporware, Go To Jail?

Tim Dierks writes "The New York Times (registration required) has an article describing a federal case against executives in Enron's broadband data division, based upon the charge that Enron claimed that a software platform was more complete and more functional than it actually was. It seems to be that if this case holds up, most of the software industry is guilty. Would the world be better off or not if it was illegal to overpromote the functionality or features of software?"

Comments

Re:Definition of Vaporware?

[Tim Macinta]

There used to be an excellent description of vaporware and why it is so damaging on Caldera's (aka, SCO's) website. It was also very damning of Microsoft and it seemed to have dropped off the net in 2001 (draw your own conclusions on how related those two points are to each other and to the the recent "licensing" done by Microsoft of "SCO's" Unix rights). Thankfully, you can still grab a copy from the Wayback Machine. The write-up is still good even if Caldera isn't.

Note: the link points to an old copy of drdos.com. Dr-Dos was recently sold to some other company, but the vaporware paper was taken down long before that.