I'll let CREN make an official answer, and quickly state that L-Soft's
official position is that the negotiations are going on, nothing final
has been decided, but we are more hopeful than we were last month. I
can't give you my personal opinion at this stage as it could prejudice
negotiations, so I'll just give you an update on what happened since
December.
In early December it became clear that we had reached a "take it or leave
it" point. CREN informed me that the issue would now have to go to the
board for approval, and asked me to provide supporting material with
business cases and feature lists showing why it is good for CREN members
to get the new versions, and why it is good for CREN to license LISTSERV
on behalf of its members. I reluctantly complied, and we agreed that we'd
do our best to keep in touch over Christmas. The board reacted positively
but I'd rather let CREN give you the details. CREN's lawyer is working on
an agreement, and L-Soft's lawyers are working on a new licensing
agreement to be used in conjunction with this agreement.
Maybe I should clarify that last point since several sites already
returned signed copies of GA-9305-2. The problem is that CREN saw a
number of problems with GA-9305-2 and was not prepared to license
LISTSERV based on that agreement. This was a serious source of contention
during the negotiation process. CREN asserted that GA-9305-2 contains
language that may cause certain CREN members to refuse signing the
agreement, which would obviously be detrimental to CREN. L-Soft on the
other hand pointed to a heap of signed copies of GA-9305-2 from academic
sites and stressed the fact that it was not in L-Soft's interest to put
itself in a position where it can't sell anything to CREN members because
they won't sign the contracts, and the discussion was going nowhere. For
unrelated reasons, L-Soft had decided to retain a law firm specialized in
software issues in order to get more competent advice on a number of
licensing issues raised by corporate customers, and L-Soft agreed to
address any problem CREN's lawyers would describe to the new lawyers,
provided that we moved on and stopped arguing about contracts, and that
sites which wanted to use GA-9305-2 (for instance because they had
already signed it and didn't care for more paperwork) could do so.
The new lawyers complained that GA-9305-2 does not follow the "industry
standard" way of designing software contracts and that changing it to
address the corporate customers' issues would be more expensive than
redrafting it as a customized version of their standard contract. Indeed
the lawyer that originally drafted GA-9305-2 did not seem to know much
about computers, whereas the new law firm has a couple former programmers
on their payroll and don't need to be taught about networks and
electronic software delivery (in fact, they are getting hooked up to the
Internet :-) ). So we are going to get a new and totally different
contract (I just got the first draft today), and we expect to let
customers choose between the new contract and GA-9305-2 for a while - at
least until this fall. I made sure that the lawyers are aware of CREN's
concern and we'll see what they come up with. Their preliminary reply is
that their contracts are "industry standard" and do not draw attention or
otherwise raise suspicion during legal review, whereas GA-9305-2 is so
unusual that it is likely to be read very carefully. I expect to be in a
position to send CREN a decent draft within a week for their review. I
had initially hoped the lawyers would work between Christmas and New
Year, but unfortunately I was told the end of December is always booked
for super-urgent jobs that absolutely have to be done before the end of
the year for legal reasons, so this didn't work out. I assume CREN had
the same problem so I don't blame them for not having a draft yet. Let's
hope things move quickly and we reach an agreement before the end of the
month.
Eric
|
