A.9.15 As one of our existing software vendors, can you just fill in this questionnaire for us?
We periodically receive requests like this, from organisations which have apparently sent out a form letter to everyone listed in their big spreadsheet of ‘software vendors’ requiring them all to answer some long list of questions about supported OS versions, paid support arrangements, compliance with assorted local regulations we haven't heard of, contact phone numbers, and other such administrivia. Many of the questions are obviously meaningless when applied to PuTTY (we don't provide any paid support in the first place!), most of the rest could have been answered with only a very quick look at our website, and some we are actively unwilling to answer (we are private individuals, why would we want to give out our home phone numbers to large corporations?).
We don't make a habit of responding in full to these questionnaires, because we are not a software vendor.
A software vendor is a company to which you are paying lots of money in return for some software. They know who you are, and they know you're paying them money; so they have an incentive to fill in your forms and questionnaires, to research any local regulations you cite if they don't already know about them, and generally to provide every scrap of information you might possibly need in the most convenient manner for you, because they want to keep being paid.
But we are a team of free software developers, and that means your relationship with us is nothing like that at all. If you once downloaded our software from our website, that's great and we hope you found it useful, but it doesn't mean we have the least idea who you are, or any incentive to do lots of unpaid work to support our ‘relationship’ with you.
It's not that we are unwilling to provide information. We put as much of it as we can on our website for your convenience, and if you actually need to know some fact about PuTTY which you haven't been able to find on the website (and which is not obviously inapplicable to free software in the first place) then please do ask us, and we'll try to answer as best we can. But we put up the website and this FAQ precisely so that we don't have to keep answering the same questions over and over again, so we aren't prepared to fill in completely generic form-letter questionnaires for people who haven't done their best to find the answers here first.
If you work for an organisation which you think might be at risk of making this mistake, we urge you to reorganise your list of software suppliers so that it clearly distinguishes paid vendors who know about you from free software developers who don't have any idea who you are. Then, only send out these mass mailings to the former.