I am receiving an increasing amount of private requests for information
on the status of the CREN/L-Soft negotiations. While it would be
inappropriate for me to say much until the negotiations are over, people
have bosses who ask legitimate questions and whose patience is not
infinite, with of course the risk that they blame L-Soft for the endless
delays and decide not to license our products. I will try to give as much
information as I can without breaking any secret. This means I will only
give you L-Soft's perspective, as I cannot speak for CREN.
The negotiations started around mid-October and are expected to continue
until the end of the month, which is the hard deadline. From Dec 1st,
L-Soft will no longer accept to discuss conditions; our proposals will
remain, but it will be "take it or leave it" until Jan 1st, at which time
the offers will expire. The reason for this hard deadline (announced in
October) is that L-Soft does not think it is useful to continue the
negotiations longer than that. Everything has already been discussed, we
are just not agreeing on the prices and conditions. Both parties should
have all the necessary elements to make an informed decision, and time is
of the essence. At any rate, this means there will be a pretty final
answer within 20 days, and an absolutely final one a month later.
If an agreement is reached, it will probably take the form of a service
license for all CREN sites that were running LISTSERV and/or LMail on Sep
1st, 1993, excluding, of course, sites which left CREN since then. L-Soft
has not been asked to make an offer that would include "new" sites. The
license would be valid from Dec 1st, 1993 to Jun 30th, 1994, which is the
end of CREN's fiscal year. L-Soft was asked to make an offer for (normal)
category II service, and one for a special "category III+" level which
would include access to new versions and to bug fixes, whereas support
would be provided by CREN, presumably in a more cost-effective manner.
Under this option, all questions and bug reports would have to go to a
CREN-designated helpdesk, which would be responsible for answering
questions and passing bug reports that are not disguised "user errors"
back to L-Soft for troubleshooting. It should be noted that, under this
scenario, L-Soft would not receive any money for technical assistance and
would thus provide no technical assistance at all. If the helpdesk failed
to answer a particular question, L-Soft would not come to the rescue.
After July 1st, people would have the option to get individual licenses
through CREN with volume discount. This is actually available whether or
not CREN gets a license for Dec-Jun. Basically, any institution willing
to send a check in advance on behalf of a large number of customers of
the same category (academic in that case), and able to provide a "point
of expertise" through which all requests for assistance have to be sent,
so that questions that have already been asked can be answered without
going back to L-Soft, is entitled to a volume discount. While the rates
and exact conditions may change depending on market evolution, the
general principle will remain: if you help us cut down our costs, we will
reward you with a discount.
At any rate, because CREN would only be writing a check on behalf of its
members and would not be the organization liable for your use of the
software, all member sites will have to agree to L-Soft's licensing
conditions, no matter how the products are eventually licensed. In order
to save time, you should order a copy of GA9305-2.PS from LISTSERV@SEARN
and send it to whoever reviews contracts at your site. A suitable
"Schedule A" would be provided in due course if a collective license is
issued.
On the topic of access to new versions, L-Soft plans to release LMail
1.2a in about a week, possibly two if some PROFS changes we are
evaluating are implemented. LISTSERV 1.8a will be released at the
beginning of December. EARN sites and US sites with a private service
license will get the new versions automatically, as before. The situation
is more complicated for sites which do not have a service license at the
time the software is released. The "service license" scheme funds
development through regular customer payments that can be easily budgeted
in advance, as opposed to one-time "upgrade charges" whose amounts and
dates of payment are unknown. In order for this to work, the customer
must pay continuously even though licenses are only issued from time to
time, simply because development and its associated costs are also a
continuous process. A customer licensed for 1.7f who gets a service
license in July 1994 and wants a copy of the latest version has in fact
not paid for the corresponding development costs. If the upgrade from
1.7f to the latest version were free, there would be no incentive to get
a service license until you badly need new functionality. To take a
concrete example, the license we were negotiating with CREN was
originally supposed to start on Nov 1. CREN said it wasn't very realistic
due to incompressible administrative delays, and this was moved to Dec 1.
Of course when they realized that this decreased the price tag without
any drawback other than making people wait a bit more for their copy of
the new version, they wanted to push the beginning date further on to
save money. It is a legitimate reaction, but one we can't allow as the
income pattern would no longer match our expenses, and we'd be giving
away several months of work for free.
Anyway, as far as individual licenses go, we understand that people have
been waiting for the outcome of the CREN/L-Soft negotiations and it would
not be fair to charge license upgrades when there was no attempt at
"cheating" in the first place. We do however want to give people an
incentive to get a license as soon as possible, and not wait until July
or whenever users start rioting :-) So we have decided:
1. That there will be no upgrade charge for people ordering a (yearly)
license before Feb 1st, 1994.
2. In February, March and April, the upgrade charge will be two months of
prorated service charges, ie you will be paying 16.7% extra only.
3. After that, upgrade charges will be calculated normally (service from
Dec 1, capped). Note that there is no upgrade charge if you purchase a
permanent right to use license to replace the free license tied to
your CREN/BITNET membership. In other words, if your management has
already decided to leave BITNET, you are mostly unaffected because,
assuming you are keeping VM, you will need to get a right to use
license for LISTSERV-TCP/IP anyway.
You can help expedite things by running contracts and budgets through
your management now, so that you are in a position to place an order in
January if the CREN/L-Soft negotiations fail to result in a collective
license. If we do reach agreement, you will need to have the contracts
approved anyway, and the budgeted money will be needed from July 1st. In
other words, you are not doing superfluous work, no matter what the final
outcome is.
Eric
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