Please Call Me inventor Nkosana Makate on Tuesday reached an agreement with Vodacom to desist from publicly speaking about the contents of negotiations between the two parties.
This came after Vodacom made an application at the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, seeking an interdict that would bar him from leaking information related to their negotiations to the media.
In court papers, the giant mobile network operator claimed that Makate's public utterances carried potential to cause irreparable harm to the entity's reputation.
The information Vodacom referred to included financial and commercial information which were central to the negotiations.
For 18 years Makate has been battling Vodacom, demanding that it compensate him for implementing his invention of a Please Call Me service.
Makate came up with the Please Call Me idea while he was working at the entity as a trainee accountant in 2000.
People sing songs outside court in support of Please Call Me inventor Nkosana Makate.
He conceived an idea that would allow his long-distance girlfriend to send him a text message, asking him to call her.
Vodacom took the matter to court following a media report in April that Makate had received a R10 million offer from the cellphone operator.
"The manner in which the respondent discussed the applicant's offer of R10 million was designed to create support for the notion that it was wholly inadequate and a comtemptable offer," Vodacom said in court papers.
It further said that such information emanated from exchanges between parties during the course of negotiations.
It also cited a radio interview Makate had on Metro FM, in which he reiterated that a R10 million offer was "crazy".
"Only one side of the negotiation process has been presented in the mass media by the respondent as the applicant has been bound to silence by the terms of the confidentiality agreement. It goes without saying that the reputational damage to the applicant is incalculable," Vodacom said in court papers.
Speaking to the Pretoria News outside court, Makate said: " The outcome is essentially the undertaking that I had already made to them. Today they opted to settle the matter and not argue in front of the judge. I am fine with that."
He said he had not disclosed any information to the media. "The information was long in the media before I even spoke about it,"he said.
Outside the court there was a group of people, who sang songs in support of Makate, demanding that Vodacom must pay what was due to him.
One of the demonstrators George Mashigo said: "People don't want to speak about the fact that there is an attempt to suppress the voices of those who come up with initiatives.