CREN, EARN and L-Soft met yesterday in Copenhagen to discuss the future of BITNET and what role L-Soft could play in all this. Here is a short informal report, which does not necessarily represent EARN's or CREN's view, I'll spare you the disclaimer. The meeting was mostly an exchange of information where each party described its future plans and tried to see how they could be made to fit with the others'. As far as L-Soft was concerned, this was mostly a presentation of L-Soft's strategic plans followed by a discussion on the future of LISTSERV; there were a number of closed sessions without L-Soft during which I assume that other relevant items were discussed. To answer the question on everyone's lips, CREN was understandably not in a position to make a decision regarding a global LISTSERV/LMail license without getting back to the board. This is inevitable in spite of the severity of the time constraints both parties are operating under, so L-Soft agreed not to market the software to CREN members until the next board meeting on October 7. Note that this does not mean we will refuse to sell licenses to CREN members until then; we will just not be mailing marketing material to CREN's members until the CREN board has made a decision. In addition, due to the complexity of the situation and the fact that some current LISTSERV users may already have plans to drop their VM system, CREN will be conducting a survey in order to determine what kind of license, if any, would be most appropriate. While I don't know the details of the survey, I imagine that it will be sent at least to the techrep of each LISTSERV site. So if your techrep is the person managing the payroll system and you think that LISTSERV is crucial enough for CREN to be acquiring a global license, you will want to make sure to brief him as soon as possible so that he doesn't give the wrong answer due to lack of information. Bear in mind that, even if charged back, a volume license would be significantly cheaper than an individual one. If all 170 sites were to be licensed, L-Soft would grant 50% of volume discount, corresponding partly to administrative, marketing and customer support savings. If the software has to be marketed individually to the members, it is inevitable that money will take longer to flow in and L-Soft programmers will end up having to spend some time answering questions from prospective customers, as it is not realistic to hire interim people and expect to be able to train them quickly enough. In the long run L-Soft would collect more money due to the removal of the volume discount, but the development of non-VM versions will be delayed. Another major item on the agenda was decreasing the load of the current core sites. L-Soft confirmed that DISTRIBUTE and the other peripheral functions necessary to operate a DISTRIBUTE server would be available in the first stage (code name "Patchwork"), since they are presently written entirely in PASCAL. That is, the first non-VM version should be able to operate a backbone server, and new servers could then be added at universities that do not have VM. LISTSERV however only requires a small amount of system resources; delivery of the message to the final recipients is what is expensive. After removing my L-Soft hat I described a number of things that could be done to improve the situation and, while neither I nor L-Soft are likely to be involved in this and I can obviously not speak for CREN, I got the feeling that very concrete steps are going to be envisioned in the next few months. CREN is no longer hoping that someone will find a "creative solution", but instead they are going to work on a concrete list of proposals and ideas. The last major item was the future of mailing list managers, and unfortunately this did not conclude as positively as the rest of the discussions. CREN is under intense pressure from people with a strong following in the Internet community to basically throw away LISTSERV and start something from scratch, in C and without NJE support or any other "stone age legacy". While this was more or less common knowledge (or at least not a surprise), given the contents of the RFP, I was not aware of the seriousness of the problem. It appears that high level managers are now making statements which one would ordinarily expect from young technical people who think they know the answer to every problem in the world, such as "it won't be useful unless it is written in C", "if it's written in PASCAL it can't possibly be any good", "anything derived from a mainframe-influenced design won't be useful to the Internet community", and so on. As a computer professional I found this deeply depressing, but of course it is a serious business problem and it needs to be addressed as such. There is no solution within L-Soft because the only way L-Soft could possibly produce a solution satisfying these people would be to dump the current VM version and development plans, fire me, and hire unix programmers to develop a totally new list manager from scratch, in C. Apart from the fact that this would be like asking Sun to please dump their current offering no matter how successful it is and start making PC's instead, it simply doesn't fly from the business angle and I can think of hundreds of other companies more qualified for this type of work than L-Soft, whose name has probably been branded as a dinosaur derivative anyway. So of course L-Soft will continue to support the VM version and to develop VMS, unix and NT versions of LISTSERV according to the plans that were already published. L-Soft works for the users, who ultimately are the ones that decide what should or should not be bought. While there will always be people arguing to their management that LISTSERV should not be used because it is written in PASCAL, we are confident that proven quality will prevail over religious arguments. None of this solves the problem, unfortunately. I can imagine that this course of action is temping for CREN as this would undoubtedly secure the continued membership of unix-oriented members (including the non-bigoted ones, which would still benefit from the availability of a unix list manager with more functionality and a much bigger development budget than the current free packages). Relying on L-Soft's politically incorrect plans to provide a unix version of LISTSERV, however, would probably not secure anything as the bigots would drop out in retaliation and the situation would remain unchanged for the non-bigots (they might benefit from L-Soft's unix development, but that is not tied to CREN membership). I am confident, however, that a solution exists. The 170-odd members with a VM system would receive actual benefits from a continued CREN membership in the event of a global LISTSERV/LMail license. This should be enough for them to renew their CREN membership another time, while L-Soft proceeds with its development plans. The non-bigoted unix sites should consider the implications of having L-Soft and CREN compete on the provision of a unix mailing list manager, with L-Soft offering full compatibility on 4 major systems by 4Q95 and having the advantage of a proven, tried-out interface and design. If L-Soft delivers before CREN does, it seems unlikely that the majority of unix sites would be willing to wait for CREN's version just for the satisfaction of not running evil PASCAL code, and CREN members will have funded an expensive development for nothing, introducing more end-user confusion on the side. If CREN somehow manages to produce an equivalent product in one year, there will still be an L-Soft version coming out within the next 6 months, with the advantage of compatibility with the installed user base and the level of end-user supportiveness that comes from listening to what users want the product to do, rather than focusing on making technical people prematurely promoted to a management position happy. It will be a serious fight and, given a suitably low entry-level price made possible by the use of inexpensive hardware, it is quite likely that certain departments will decide to use L-Soft's product on their own while others run the politically approved version. Ultimately, the end users are going to get what they want to have, and whether we like it or not we are living in a world of PC users who are using the mail programs they are using, and aren't going to switch just because they can't conveniently use the politically correct list server with their current mail program. At any rate, this survey would be the ideal time to tell CREN whether your organization would rather see it compete with the current LISTSERV or just stay in the background while it is being developed. I cannot see any business reason for CREN to revive the RFP other than as a means of securing continued income from a certain category of members. If a majority of CREN members were to say that their decisions regarding continued membership would not be affected, or would be negatively affected, by a decision to develop a new unix list manager from scratch, the problem will be solved. Eric