In the past few weeks, we have been receiving a number of requests for
clarifications regarding the CREN/L-Soft contract, and, more recently,
CREN's announcement of the 50% discount on L-Soft maintenance. Now some
customers are referring to incorrect licensing information which they
claim to have received from BITNIC. While I am sure it is just a
misunderstanding, I think the time has come to post all the
clarifications in a single message. I apologize for the length, but I
thought it was best to have all the necessary details in a single file,
for the sake of simplicitly.
Disclaimer: While, to the best of our knowledge, all the facts in this
message are accurate, it is not possible to sum up a formal contract or
announcement in a few lines without omitting a lot of information, and
the process of turning 30 pages of legalese into a 50-line English
summary is necessarily error-prone. Thus, the legally binding text is
that of the contracts and announcements described in this message. L-Soft
international Inc. ("L-Soft" in this document) does not represent or
warrant that the condensed information in the present message is
accurate, or that the shortened terms will be honoured by L-Soft or other
parties.
*****************************
* The CREN/L-Soft agreement *
*****************************
The CREN/L-Soft agreement provides that CREN members that were running
LISTSERV and/or LMail on September 1, 1993 may apply for FREE support and
maintenance through June 30, 1994. The support is free to you because
CREN paid for it on your behalf. While the contract states that "CREN may
make any charge upon the Licensed Member as CREN solely elects", CREN
later made public statements to the effect that this would NOT apply to
the Dec 1 - Jun 30 period. Thus there is nothing to pay, and no
commitment from you to pay anything in the future. This is also a good
way to get the current versions while the purchasing department is
working on your PO for next year.
In addition, the CREN/L-Soft agreement provides that CREN members who did
the above and who also extend their CREN membership for another year may
apply for support and maintenance for the period Jul 94 - Jun 95 with a
discount of up to 50%, based on the number of copies CREN will end up
ordering. The CREN board recently decided to guarantee the maximal
discount of 50% to its members, which means that you will receive a 50%
discount regardless of the price CREN ends up paying. Note that this does
not mean CREN is going to pay half of your bill. CREN only needs some
30-40 sites (depending on the exact product combinations) to receive the
full 50% discount from L-Soft. CREN is taking the risk and incertitude
away from you by agreeing to pay the difference, should there be too
little sites renewing their maintenance through CREN to receive the 50%
discount from L-Soft. The maximum cost to CREN, for the entire network,
is $9,670.50, and indeed L-Soft had suggested that CREN make this
guarantee from day one, in order to facilitate purchasing.
This volume discount is financed through reduced costs to L-Soft - less
bills to handle, of course, but above all reduced support costs. When you
purchase maintenance through CREN, you receive support from the CREN help
desk at BITNIC ([log in to unmask]), rather than from L-Soft's
support team ([log in to unmask]). When the CREN help desk finds a bug in
the code, it submits a problem report to L-Soft and we prepare a fix, and
of course you get the same code regardless of who you purchase
maintenance from. When you just have a question or need assistance in
solving a configuration problem, however, it is the CREN help desk that
is responsible for answering your query.
For the sake of completeness, I will note that the CREN/L-Soft contract
also includes a number of price guarantees for the purchase of various
L-Soft products. These prices are higher than what we charge other
academic (non-CREN) customers, so we usually do not even mention this
section of the CREN/L-Soft agreement.
******************
* CREN vs L-Soft *
******************
A few days after the signature of the CREN/L-Soft agreement, CREN
announced that it had purchased the rights to the unix list manager
package known as ListProc, and planned to further develop it. Each
non-profit CREN member will receive one free license, for use on a single
computer of any size. Additional copies will be at a charge, and the
software will also be sold to for-profit CREN members, and to
organizations which are not CREN members.
What this means concretely is that CREN and L-Soft are competitors since
the date this announcement was posted (March 18, 1994) - and even more so
since the announcement of the unix version of LISTSERV on May 4. The
provisions of the CREN/L-Soft contract are a legacy, much like the
contract between IBM and Microsoft regarding access to Windows code. The
reason I am pointing this out so explicitly is that it makes it easier to
understand the various offers and tell incorrect information from genuine
offers. There is no partnership between CREN and L-Soft. If someone tells
you there is an L-Soft package (other than the maintenance agreement in
the CREN/L-Soft contract) which is only available to CREN members that
opt to retain their CREN membership, that person is misinformed. There
are indeed a number of packages available only to CREN members, but their
purpose is to provide a cost-effective alternative to the services CREN
is offering. There is nothing hidden here, just the same healthy
competition that helps keeping the prices down in the rest of the
computer industry. The customer compares costs and value, and chooses the
vendor that best meets his price and functionality requirements.
*******************
* LISTSERV-TCP/IP *
*******************
LISTSERV-TCP/IP is one of the solutions we offer sites that wish to leave
BITNET, but retain the LISTSERV benefits they have enjoyed while they
were on BITNET. LISTSERV-TCP/IP is a superset of "LISTSERV Classic" that
does not require NJE connectivity, but is otherwise totally compatible.
If you have plans to keep VM for the next couple years, this is probably
the best migration alternative.
LISTSERV-TCP/IP was not included in the CREN/L-Soft contract and is thus
only available from L-Soft. Since there have been discussions between
CREN and L-Soft about adding LISTSERV-TCP/IP maintenance to the CREN
contract in the few days between the signature of that contract and the
ListProc announcement, you may have heard another explanation, possibly
even from an L-Soft employee. Once CREN became our competitor, we of
course decided to end the embryonic partnership we had started, and did
not pursue that issue any further.
********************
* LISTSERV for VMS *
********************
In addition to its obvious usefulness to VMS-only shops, LISTSERV for VMS
is an interesting migration alternative for sites that must part with
their mainframe systems, but have local VMS expertise and wish to retain
NJE. LISTSERV for VMS comes with full support for NJE (although you can
run it in TCP/IP mode if you prefer). We have made good progress on the
beta-testing and are down to programming around a couple UCX oddities,
testing the software with PMDF, and packaging it properly. LISTSERV for
VMS is only available from L-Soft.
*********************
* LISTSERV for unix *
*********************
Another alternative for sites that must phase out their mainframe systems
is LISTSERV for unix. Here too we have made good progress, and are down
to theological debates on the best way to interface the system to
sendmail, what kind of site-customizable interfaces to provide to
accomodate sendmail variants, and similar time-consuming but fairly
predictable problems. We are also testing the code on all sorts of unixes
to find out how difficult it would be to support them, and so far we
haven't had to change any code (only compilation scripts, makefiles and
the like). We remain firmly convinced that, from the technical point of
view, we can support just about any 32-bit unix with a socket interface
and either gcc or a robust ANSI compiler.
There is a special package for CREN sites offering an indefinite license
plus one year of support for 75% of your FY'93 CREN membership. This
offer does NOT require you to extend your CREN membership, it is just a
run of the mill price war. CREN is offering one free copy of their unix
list manager to people who renew their CREN membership, presumably as an
incentive for members that have decided to leave NJE and phase out their
VM systems to retain their CREN membership nonetheless. We believe our
unix product offers a lot more functionality and investment protection
than ListProc, and we are making it available at a fraction of the CREN
membership fee in order to show that L-Soft gives you more for less. The
75% offer is only available for the unix version, because CREN's product
is only available for unix. The VM and VMS market present different
challenges, which we will address with other promotional offers that
better meet the needs of VM/VMS customers. For instance, we will offer
migration plans from VM to either VMS or unix, and clusterwide gradated
(pay-per-capacity) licenses for VMS.
*********************************************************************
* Why does L-Soft push the CREN/L-Soft contract's free maintenance? *
*********************************************************************
The reason L-Soft encouraged its customers to take advantage of the
CREN/L-Soft contract's free maintenance, in spite of the ListProc
announcement, is that it makes it possible for you to receive the latest
version of the software while your purchase department and/or budgeting
officers are working on a stable solution for next year. We want people
to run the latest version so that they can take advantage of the latest
improvements and see for themselves that maintenance dollars are being
put to good use, and hopefully sign up for another year of maintenance
from L-Soft.
For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that L-Soft will owe
CREN a credit on July 8th by the amount of "unused" free maintenance
points. "Earning" the license points is only a secondary concern, because
with the legal complications caused by the "charge any amount" and
"master agreement takes precedence" clauses, plus the administrative
problems caused by the lack of a firm price for CREN-procured maintenance
for next year (before the recent board announcement), we expect that most
of the paperwork will fail to meet the July 1st deadline. To date, only
16 out of 160-odd nodes have returned the paperwork, and several sites
decided to place an order directly with L-Soft rather than go through the
aggravation of fighting their legal department. Thus we expect to owe
CREN a bigger credit than they can actually use on next year's
maintenance, which the CREN/L-Soft contract only permits if you signed up
before the deadline. The remainder of the credit can only be used on
non-transferable licenses, maintenance or other services in CREN's name,
which are not very useful to CREN and thus not a concern to us.
************************************
* Why get maintenance from L-Soft? *
************************************
L-Soft recommends that you procure maintenance for L-Soft products
directly from L-Soft, not because we make more money on a direct purchase
but because CREN is our competitor, and they are directly involved in the
provision of the service you are purchasing (CREN staff answers your
questions). Getting LISTSERV support from CREN would be like purchasing
VMS support from Sun or IBM. Without questioning the integrity of the
individuals providing such support, the plain business reality is that it
would not be in the service provider's corporate interest to do a good
job, as they would sell more copies of their products if they are better
supported than the competition's. In the corporate world, this would not
be a serious concern as the customers would quickly revert to the
original vendor. In the academic world, however, budgets are made in
Spring for the entire year, and it can prove very difficult, if not
utterly impossible, to get any money afterwards.
In order to show that our concern is genuine, we will give you the same
50% discount you would get through CREN if you agree not to extend your
CREN membership past July 1st. We will actually make less money, since
your questions will be answered by L-Soft staff rather than CREN staff,
but we will not have to worry about being dependent on a competitor's
goodwill for our corporate image. This offer applies to any CPU listed in
Schedule A of the CREN/L-Soft contract, for the corresponding products -
even if you do not manage to return the paperwork by the deadline. It
is not cumulative with other discounts unless that is explicitly stated.
***************************************
* Long term prospects (business case) *
***************************************
The CREN/L-Soft agreement is a one-time complication, because it does not
extend past June 30, 1995 (the original contract does not even include an
option for renewal). Thus there is no question that, if you wish to keep
using L-Soft products, you will eventually need to procure licenses and
services directly from L-Soft. Now is the best time to do so, as the
existence of this contract forces us to make a number of promotional
offers to protect our corporate integrity. In one year, we expect that
our VMS, unix and (future) NT versions of LISTSERV will have reached the
same level of functionality as the VM version, with, of course, full and
uncompromising compatibility. We will be in a position of force with no
business reason to make special offers for CREN FY'95 members. NJE will
probably be in its last throes, and people will desperately need to
purchase LISTSERV-TCP/IP, or then one of the non-VM versions, because the
users will demand that the service be continued while the upstream nodes
will be reminding people that they are leaving in two months. This is not
the kind of market that is conducive to special promotional offers; it is
the kind of situation where you just tell people what the list price is,
and wait for the users to form a mob outside their office if they object
that it was cheaper last year.
L-Soft offers you a smooth migration path from NJE to TCP/IP, and from VM
to either VMS, unix, or, in the future, Windows NT. Because our products
have a very high degree of compatibility and interoperate across
heterogeneous environments, you can migrate your workload from one system
to the other at the pace that is most appropriate for your users. For
instance, you may have a number of high-volume administrative lists for
which database access is not required, and whose users do not use the
file server functions other than for retrieving list archives. Moving
these lists from VM to VMS or unix is as easy as running FTP to move a
few files around. There is nothing to change, the messages are strictly
identical, and, in fact, most users are unlikely to notice the move if
you set up the necessary mail aliases. Later, when the database functions
are ported to the non-VM versions, you can use the same simple procedure
to migrate the remaining lists and phase out the VM service. No other
vendors offers you this degree of control over your migration; in the
best case, there will be a document with migration advice and a FAQ for
the victims, in the worst case nothing at all.
L-Soft is the only vendor to offer a list manager implemented on multiple
operating systems. This, combined with the fact that LISTSERV has been
around since 1986 and has the largest user base of any list manager,
makes it the most likely candidate for standardization. L-Soft sees
standardization as an inevitable step in the evolution of LISTSERV, just
as the migration to a portable code base with unix, VMS and (in the
future) Windows NT products was inevitable. Our competitors failed to
impose their syntax, interface and protocols as even draft Internet
standards when LISTSERV was at its weakest, being available only on
highly expensive and unfashionable IBM mainframes. Now that LISTSERV is
portable while competing products only run on a single environment, the
likelihood of seeing a competitor's product turn into an Internet
standard is virtually zero. Even if that happens, the sheer size of the
LISTSERV user community is your guarantee of a smooth migration path.
When evaluating the various list managers, a useful approach is to step
back from all the announcements and feature lists and offers, and take a
few moments to consider the reasons why you are purchasing a list manager
in the first place. In most cases, there is an element of time, money or
manpower in the answer: the list manager saves a few minutes a day, every
day, for the thousands of (non-technical) people that it helps bringing
together. In addition, the list manager saves a lot of time for the
technical staff that would otherwise have to perform unmotivating,
error-prone clerical tasks. But a user-hostile list manager can actually
cost you money! As the users have to spend 15 minutes calling a help desk
every time they have a problem, you would quickly lose a lot of manpower
and thus money, even though you might have saved some by installing a
free list manager available via anonymous FTP. Most non-technical users
do not know how to use their computer effectively, and are not willing to
learn complicated computer concepts in order to use a product. Instead of
learning things that intimidate them, they will waste precious time using
simpler techniques that they have already mastered; for instance, your
average user will retype 30 addresses by hand, with two fingers, rather
than learn about regular expressions, for fear of making a mistake and
"destroying everything". A good test of the suitability of a mailing list
manager is the degree of technical knowledge that it requires of list
owners. If list owners are assumed to be familiar with perl, awk, regular
expressions and other unix concepts, you can be sure that most
computer-shy owners will be frightened and give up, or run their list on
a more user-friendly list manager at another university. This in turn
would increase your support costs dramatically, as your users would be
exposed to incompatible systems in their everyday work. The single
largest cost in the operation of a typical list manager is the investment
in user training and the resulting helpdesk and end-user manpower costs.
The cost of an indefinite LISTSERV license being on the order of one
month of salary + overhead for a single employee, it is just not cost
effective to run a user-hostile package just because it was free, or,
even worse, to switch a happy LISTSERV user population to a user-hostile
package and incur manpower losses at least an order of magnitude higher
than the cost of the license.
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