From: Paul Robinson <[log in to unmask]> Organization: Tansin A. Darcos & Company, Silver Spring, MD USA ----- ET> A number of people privately asked me for more information > about the commercialization of LISTSERV, and some expressed > their concern about what would happen if they suddenly had to > pay to keep using the software. Hmm, most of these places had to pay for the computers they have, the electricity they use and the salaries of the people they hire. Yet they seem to think that *you* aren't entitled to make money off of the efforts of your ability. Typical socialist attitude that is far too prevalent at educational institutions (especially in the U.S.) and has damn near destroyed most of Europe, as amy philosophy based on stealing would. ET> You can keep using the version of LISTSERV you have now for > as long as you want and without having to pay anything. You > are protected by the license agreement you had with me when > you ordered the software. That is extremely generous on your part. How much money has Educom gotten out of licensing Listserv? Bitnet connections wouldn't be worth 10c without the Listserv and mailer capabilities. $2,000,000? $5,000,000? For which, I think, your share was exactly nil; and they didn't even want to consider contracting with you for further releases? ET> So we decided that the next versions of LISTSERV and LMail > would only be available to paying customers, and that I would > stop handing out free licenses to new BITNET sites on the 1st > of September. Again, extremely generous. Did anyone even bother to offer you any thanks for your work? Or has it been a non-stop stream of complaints about the things they aren't getting from software they didn't even pay you anything for? As soon as you decided to make it commercial, you probably should have stopped further distributions except for contract requirements. If you will permit me to do so, of all the people who have used your program, *I* for one will say thank you for your efforts. ET> Now, I am sure there will be people bold enough to complain > that we aren't fixing bugs in the older, free version, or that > I did not place the last free versions in the public domain > just before making it a commercial product You are neither a common carrier nor a philanthropic organization. You are under no obligation - and no one has a right to expect you - to give away any property of yours, especially something as valuable as this program is. If they don't like it, they can use the Greek list manager program or they can use Majordomo or Concierge or whatever the name of that other one is. Or write their own if they don't like what's out there. ET> I don't want people to say "But you promised to keep > supporting us until 1994!". They expect someone (you) to keep a promise (which I'm not sure that it is one) to offer them free support for something that you have received exactly zero in payments for. How interesting. How long would they expect to survive themselves on a system like that? Or the Electric Company? Committment works both ways. What exactly, have they offered, for their complaints of alleged "lack of promise"? Where were the offers of assistance to get you a Microvax so you could develop the program further? Exactly what have they done besides complain? What exactly has been offered to make it easier for you to work? ET> Finally, the only reason we haven't started negotiations > with the other cooperating networks is a very tight > schedule and the time of year, plus the fact that some > countries simply cannot afford to pay US-level > licensing fees in hard currencies. So you find out what they can pay and charge accordingly. In the U.S., prescription drugs cost about ten times what they cost in Mexico. Those people who are howling about the expense of medical drugs seem to forget that people in Mexico can't pay the kind of rates someone in the U.S. can. They also forget that the company may be taking a loss there in order to keep market share, or it may be cheaper to distribute there, e.g. that it is subsidizing the sales in Mexico with some profits from U.S. Sales. They also forget that drugs cost money because the government or insurance companies subsidize almost everything else in the Medical Industry. In the United States, a call from the U.S. to Moscow costs about U.S. $2.25 (plus or minus 1 cent) for the first minute using all three Long Distance companies (AT&T, MCI and Sprint). However, a call from Moscow to Washington, DC, will cost a caller there about 6 cents ($0.06) a minute, if I remember correctly. Yet in local charges, 6 cents im Moscow is the purchasing power equivalent in the U.S. of about $6.00. ET> L-Soft is very interested in cooperative agreements where we > would provide software at a high discount rate, or even free, > but would receive something useful in exchange. Three years ago, in the U.S. most people bought cars on time payments and paid a high down payment and high monthly payments. Today, more than half of all automobile transactions involve a l ease of an automobile where the "buyer" pays a lot less in downpayment and a lot less per month, with some leases having the proviso that when they finish the lease, they pay the difference between what the car is worth after depreciation, minus the amount of usage taken over a standard figure. Some leases are essentially the same as a sale; at the end of the lease, you can walk away and owe nothing, buy the car for the residual, or start a new lease with a brand new car. This has caused some people who would have purchased an Oldsmobile to lease a Cadillac or a Mercedes Benz. In essence, the automobile companies are using a reduced-price strategy to build brand loyalty. They used to offer a rebate of the purchase price, e.g. a $1000 kickback after the financing had gone through. Now they simply reduce the cost per month instead. My advice: charge *something*, even if it is a ridiculous fraction of the usual price. People don't respect that which they get for free. Or lease the software to them for a reduced rate with an increase down the line as the country becomes more able to afford things. If you have to, find a local agent who can trade something there for something else, e.g. make barter deals if you have to. Charge them *something*, or they'll resent you for your giving them something of value and not making them pay for it. As soon as people think they can get something for nothing, they see the "donor" as a milch cow from which they can demand still more. And resent him for not giving 200% of his capability. ET> Some of these countries may be premium markets in 5 years, > and we have to find a suitable way to give them the help > they need while bearing in mind that L-Soft is not a > branch of the Salvation Army. And Electronic Mail is not food supplies or water either. E-Mail is a higher level abstraction up the chain of industrial development. It's a step in advancement of a technological base. But someone has to pay for that development. Fail to make it known that software costs money to create and must be paid for, and you encourage piracy. If they don't have to pay anything for the program, why should they care if they give it away or copy some other company's program? ET> Finally, I thought that you would want to know what > L-Soft plans to do with this money. Eric, I am very surprised at you. And, as a typical American, I'll be crude about it and point out that you should be proud to realize that's nobody else's goddamn business how much money you make selling things or what percentage of profit you make. If you provide something of value, you're entitled to charge whatever market price you think you can get, and make money off of it. If you want to say that you will make a profit and part of that profit will be invested toward making the product better, that's one thing. But nobody should apologize for their honest efforts in a free market. It's that vein of resentment of those who are better off than others that the current President of the United States is trying to mine in order to pass another tax increase which will wreck the American economy (and by ripple effect, the rest of the world) and make the U.S. deficit situation worse. But it's people with money who apologize for their wealth, or people who sell things who apologize for what they charge that damage their own standing. If you make your money honestly, the answer is to say that; anyone who doesn't like it can go to hell. They don't have to buy your product or service and they don't have to use it if they don't like it. ET> Unfortunately, management sometimes takes statements like > "SENDFILE is a totally useless anachronism, FTP is all you > will ever need and the proof that SENDFILE is useless is > that the Internet would already have it otherwise" Any new service has to start someplace. I can claim that the multi-billion-dollar Internet is garbage for doing file transfers because it doesn't have ZMODEM on the high-speed lines and yet I have it on my $45 terminal program, Telemate. :) There is a story - possibly myth - that one of the Commissioners of the U.S. Patent Office recommended that it be closed because everything that could be invented already had been. This was back in 1850. Everything on Internet came about because someone had a need for something that they could use. FTP is fine if you have a full high-bandwidth connection. In fact, it's only been for a short period of time that there has been FTP by Mail service available; until that came about, there was nothing available for someone at a system without direct internet connections, like MCIMAIL, for example. :) And of the services out there, (Paul Vixie's FTPMAIL from DEC Western Research Lab being the only one available to non-Bitnet sites), none of them provide any means to *put* files on a server; the only option available is to UUENCODE them and mail them (or BASE64 encode them if your mailer has MIME capability) to someone on the site. ET> The next step will be to port it to Windows NT, which > is very close to VMS and will further decrease the price > tag of the "entry level" LISTSERV configuration. I would expect it to be close to VMS! VMS was designed and created by the man who wrote *over one weekend* the RSX-11/M operating system: David Cutler. Do you know who Microsoft Corporation hired away from DEC to design and create Windows/NT? The *very same* David N. Cutler who was the designer of VMS. --- Paul Robinson - [log in to unmask] ----- The following Automatic Fortune Cookie was selected only for this message: I don't care how poor and inefficient a country is; they like to run their own business. I know men that would make my wife a better husband than I am; but, darn it, I'm not going to give her to 'em. -- Will Rogers