On Tue, 7 Dec 1993 06:55:25 PST Dave Gomberg <[log in to unmask]>
said:
>Does the latest post from BITNIC mean they have decided against L-Soft?
Speaking only for myself, I see the latest post from BITNIC as yet
another outrageous attempt at taking credit for LISTSERV on the
assumption that I will look the other way to avoid jeopardizing the
CREN/L-Soft negotiations. Speaking now for L-Soft, this is a serious
business offense as this was actually a printed brochure used in a PR
context at the EDUCOM conference. After reading this brochure, some
potential L-Soft customers (such as your own bosses) may get the
incorrect assumption that CREN is the entity doing all the good work on
LISTSERV and send CREN a check when they really thought they were
subsidizing the makers of LISTSERV. This might be tolerable if CREN had
been L-Soft's business partner at the time the brochure was distributed
and we could at least count on getting a fraction of that check in the
form of license fees. But we don't even know whether CREN will ever
decide to become L-Soft's business partner, so this is simply not
tolerable and we are currently discussing what is the best way to respond
to this. We will probably send mail to all the people we expect to have
received a copy of said brochure with some clarifications in a neutral
tone. It suppose it will be lost in the Christmas mail flood but it will
at least make it clear to CREN that we will not tolerate such abuse in
the future.
>They say something like: We will port the features of LISTSERV to an
>open platform... in their list of things to do.
Sure, but they also say they will migrate the current LISTSERV backbone
to IP, which is clearly something only L-Soft can do (ie this refers to
LISTSERV-TCP/IP). If CREN developed new software it wouldn't be
"migrating the current LISTSERV backbone", it would be something new.
In my opinion there is no relationship between the brochure and the CREN
negotiations. If you'll just ignore the misleading language about
LISTSERV, the brochure is entirely in line with previous papers and
statements about CREN's strategy (which actually were already on the
borderline with regard to LISTSERV). The CREN negotiations are creeping
on in the same sinuous patterns as one month or two months ago. I believe
CREN is about to go to the board with a proposal which I would say has a
50% chance of being approved. Roughly speaking, the proposal (made in
October) offers service licenses to CREN members at a 50% discount and
with price+terms guaranteed for 19 months, on the condition that CREN
collect the money and pay L-Soft in advance with a single check, that
volume exceed 50 units, and that CREN purchase maintenance from Dec 1st,
1993 (that date was actually set in October under the assumption that the
contract would be signed well before December...) The BITNIC-provided
maintenance option has been dropped in the course of the negotiations, so
we are talking about a straight discount on L-Soft provided services.
L-Soft benefits by receiving payment right away for the many sites which
would otherwise not be able to pay before this spring, for budget related
reasons. With this money we would be able to hire people to write
documentation, which otherwise will not be possible until next summer,
and another programmer to work on other projects such as L-Gopher or
L-SMTP. Funding for LISTSERV development, customer support, the initial
phases of the porting effort and the off-the-shelf mailing list service
has already been secured and earmarked, so there is no need for you to be
worried. We are even on schedule for the porting effort :-) With the
release of 1.8a today, all the steps in the 1993 table of GM-9308-1 have
been carried out. I also heard yesterday that GNU is working on a PASCAL
compiler, which depending on the specifics may or may perhaps not
facilitate the unix development.
Eric
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