Pursuant to section  6 of the CREN/L-Soft contract, CREN  has informed us
that  the  following  14  "Licensed Members"  would  be  extending  their
LISTSERV and/or LMail maintenance via CREN through June 1995:
 
     AUVM
     GWUVM
     IUBVM
     LATECH
     NIHLIST
     OCC
     PSUORVM
     PSUVM
     TEMPLEVM
     UGA
     UHCCVM
     UIUCVMD
     UIUCVM42
     UMSLVMA
 
If you are  on the list, CREN will  send you a bill and  you will receive
support  through the  CREN  helpdesk  until June  30,  1995, with  L-Soft
providing  second-level  support  under  the  terms  of  the  CREN/L-Soft
agreement. Note  that CREN did not  include BITNIC on the  list. Thus, it
looks like the CREN helpdesk will not have access to the current versions
of LISTSERV and  LMail (they can always purchase  support separately, but
this sounds unlikely).
 
If you  had notified CREN of  your desire to extend  your LISTSERV and/or
LMail support  through them, but  are not on the  list, it means  that we
either did not receive your contract on time (or had to return it because
of a mistake or  a change we could not accept), or that  CREN did not put
you on the "Extending Members" list they mailed us on June 30 and amended
on  July 1.  Since July  1 was  the  deadline for  CREN to  send us  such
notifications (section 6), it is too late to change things, except in one
case: CREN gave us a list of  4 sites that wished to extend their support
through CREN,  but whose contracts  were still in  the mail. One  of them
arrived on July  1 and has been  added to the extending list.  We will do
the same with the other 3 if  we receive the contracts before July 8 (the
CREN/L-Soft contract requires us to formally issue a credit to CREN on or
before July 8,  so we cannot possibly add sites  after that date). Please
do not resend or FAX the contracts  - pursuant to section 4, they must be
postmarked on or before June 30 in order to be acceptable.
 
If  you are  not on  the extending  list (or  even if  you are),  you can
purchase support directly from L-Soft  at the same price. This eliminates
an intermediary, and  greatly simplifies the paperwork  your lawyers have
to review.  We have never had  any problem with our  maintenance contract
when it was not  associated with the CREN contract (at  least not with US
academic customers). Purchase lawyers are  simply not used to three-party
agreements  like the  CREN/L-Soft/member  contract suite,  and of  course
people are  generally wary of deals  that purport to offer  something for
free if you will  just sign a 30-page contract within  a short time frame
:-) Now  that we are  back to  a classical two-party  purchase situation,
this should no longer be a problem.
 
You can get a copy of the "standalone" maintenance agreement by sending a
GET VM_MNT PS  command to [log in to unmask] The  file includes instructions
and the exhibit is pre-filled for LISTSERV+LMail.
 
We are still negotiating with CREN on  the issue of releasing 1.8a to all
the CREN  members that did  not manage to  push the paperwork  past legal
review on  time. Because of  the unfortunate  use of the  word "executed"
rather than "agreed" in section 4, we had no option but to request CREN's
written  permission to  advance beneficiaries  to Licensed  Member status
without a  written Member  Agreement. In  spite of the  fact that  it was
clearly the  intent of the  contract to release  the software to  all the
beneficiaries, and that section 4 was added only for L-Soft's protection,
we would  be breaching the  contract if  we advanced the  remaining sites
without  CREN's  written permission.  We  thought  that obtaining  CREN's
authorization would  be a simple  formality, since  it is clearly  in the
interest of  CREN's members to  receive 1.8a and  become LTCP-exploitive,
but unfortunately  it turned  out to  be a lot  more complicated  than we
expected.
 
L-Soft remains totally committed to  making the current LISTSERV backbone
LTCP-exploitive  by  the end  of  the  month. If  we  do  not succeed  in
convincing CREN  to let us  deliver 1.8a to all  CREN members at  our own
risk, we will retrofit the LTCP exploitation code into 1.7f and deliver a
free FIX17FT update within the  month, using the 1.7f licensing agreement
between Eric  Thomas and the  various LISTSERV sites. Our  LTCP customers
need not worry about bad surprises. The lack of LTCP exploitation impacts
mostly the remaining LNJE sites, whose  load will increase as they cannot
take advantage  of the  LTCP servers.  Thus, even if  for some  reason we
failed to make the backbone LTCP-exploitive, this would only make it more
attractive for LNJE sites to migrate to LTCP.
 
  Eric