In 1996 we wrote a short note on WHAT_CHECK. The fact that protein structures contain errors caught the community by surprise at that time. A few weeks later Nature published another note, now by some prominent crystallographers who stated that WHAT_CHECK produced many false positive error messages. We were caught by surprise by this note in Nature. By the way, two of the three authors of that note have by now apologized for it.
The point that the authors went (very) public with what they believed to be an error in WHAT_CHECK (but which was later convincingly proven to be an error in their data and that data was corrected in the PDB a few years later) was not only very unpleasant for us who wrote WHAT_CHECK, but also very contra-productive. WHAT_CHECK development was delayed by many years; partly because a big grant for its development could not be renewed. So, as a developer who really suffered from not getting user feedback, I can tell from first hand that user feedback is not only appreciated, it also is the honest and scientifically most productive way of dealing with perceived software problems, and it might even avoid that the complaining user needs to apologize. And if a disclaimer needs to be written, then this is obviously best done by the author of the software for which the disclaimer holds. Greetings Gert Het Radboudumc staat geregistreerd bij de Kamer van Koophandel in het handelsregister onder nummer 41055629. The Radboud university medical center is listed in the Commercial Register of the Chamber of Commerce under file number 41055629.
