Developers: If You Have Mango, You Can't Talk About It

So you received your invite to download the Mango beta and you're planning to write up a 1500 word epic feature-palooza all about it? Better think twice about that kid, because Microsoft could sue you if you do that. See if you paid attention to that legal agreement that you were forced to sign in order to update, you'd have known that there's a confidentiality clause that you have agreed to. You didn't read it? Well here's the part we're talking about:

8. Confidentiality: By participating in this program, the developer agrees to not publish any content, screenshots or comments in any media in advance of the official launch of Windows Phone ‘Mango’.

Now if you're not good with legal-speak, this means that you can't talk about Mango at all in any form of media. This isn't just limited to news sites like ours: it includes talking, Twitter, Facebook, email, text messages, and whatever other kind of sharing medium you can probably think of.

For us, this really really really sucks. You cannot even begin to imagine just how much this has ruined our plans to have Mango coverage. Sadly our site was not big enough to participate in the Mango previews that Microsoft handed out to multiple members of the press, and our one saving grace would have been this beta update because we have a student developer account. Now this has really fudged things up on our side, and there's no real reason that we have seen to justify this from Microsoft's perspective. Journalists obviously didn't have a non-disclosure agreement to sign because they ripped Mango wide open once the embargo was lifted, so why are developers getting the short end of the stick?

Anyway besides our own issues we recommend you to proceed with a lot of caution when talking about Mango. For the most part, avoid taking photos and screenshots of your Mango phone and if you're releasing an update of your app for Mango devices to test, don't specifically mention what features you've included.

What do you think about this NDA, developers?

Via: WinRumors