Dear Lua4Delphi author,
This is an open public letter; of the steps you can take -
First, this is on behalf of a customer (won’t mention his name here) who asked you for an update on your Lua4Delphi project.
Your Lua4Delphi got crowd-funded, it got attention on several Delphi-related websites and blogs. Great! Congratulations! You’re got a good start.
There is a legal right to fulfill all your crowd-funding obligations (deliver a product, answer your customer’s questions).
Are innocent questions, like, “is there an update?”, “there’s a bug/issue in (pascal-file) and can you update this?” an offense to you?
You told on your blog, that there will be login/password and sometime later, you took your website down. After your website is taken down, how will customers get updates?
Do you have a somewhat ready or completed version available for demonstration? Do surprise your customers. I’m sure they’ll be delighted.
Stalking
If you put your place-of-residence address same as your company’s address, anyone can come to your, office? and ask for (you) or (your company name). How is that considered stalking?
Tip: You might want to consider renting co-working space, businesses where you can use their address and collect Postal Mail, or a pub with a long-term room to rent (latest craze - upstairs work, downstairs pubbing) - as your business address.
Keeping track of funds and refunds
As an owner of a business, it is your responsibility to keep track of where the money is going. Did you file company taxes?
If you cannot fulfil your crowd-funding obligations, you should consider making refunds, keep your customers informed of progress, instead of lashing out at others.
If you are getting harassed, (whom? what was damaged? what URL?) you can take down and print out the slander, defamatory words to the Met (aka Police).
If it is truly defamatory or slanderous, you can get Met to investigate. I’m sure someone there can give you legal advice on what to do next - restraining order, personal protection order (PPO), summons for them to explain their behavior, or warrant for arrest if they damaged your property or threatened you physically.
If they don’t show up, you can get the judge for a default-judgement and wham. You got them.
If you don’t deliver on your crowd-funded promises, your customers can sue you to recover the amounts paid to you.
If you don’t show-up in court, the third-party other-party can get a default judgement, get bailiffs come over to your place of business, put items used for your business sold-off to pay off debts.
Did you register as a sole proprietor? If so, you are on hook for all of the debts of the company.
Tip. It’s smart if you can get a few of your friends and start a business and start a limited liability company.
I’m sure this publicly available blogpost is of help to you and others looking to start a business.
British Computer Society meetings
As you are an IT-practitioner, you can consider attending meetings and events by the BCS. They have non-member and member rates if you do plop-down to their events.
Public Court Proceedings
I can attend court (e.g. attending public court hearings of Embarcadero vs. UK-based Delphi-development companies for copyright infringement, pleadings for summons, etc.).
I don’t have a right to do live streaming in court, take photos (to find out who’s there) or blog about confidential settlement terms.
If a judgement is made publicly available - I can blog about it, without lying or publishing false or fake information.
Most commercial judgements are eventually made publicly available.
I can ask the businesses affected, questions about why they were sued, how this happened. They have a right not to reply, and I won’t contact them ever again.
Some do -
One business owner said, his hired helper uploaded his Delphi serial and paid libraries he brought and didn’t know until he got letter from a barrister.
Tip: If someone else, did it, you can plead you didn’t do it, and someone else did it. Helps a little, since these well-liked Delphi developers looking for a job will learn what it means to be cool on file-sharing forums.
Reputation matters - if there’s a new product from LaKraven, I’ll ignore it as it’ll probably be vaporware, or something non-existent.
If the author of Lua4Delphi don’t feel like finishing Lua4Delphi, he should issue refunds, tell that Lua4Delphi is…
Over and out.