I am receiving an increasing amount of private requests for information on the status of the CREN/L-Soft negotiations. While it would be inappropriate for me to say much until the negotiations are over, people have bosses who ask legitimate questions and whose patience is not infinite, with of course the risk that they blame L-Soft for the endless delays and decide not to license our products. I will try to give as much information as I can without breaking any secret. This means I will only give you L-Soft's perspective, as I cannot speak for CREN. The negotiations started around mid-October and are expected to continue until the end of the month, which is the hard deadline. From Dec 1st, L-Soft will no longer accept to discuss conditions; our proposals will remain, but it will be "take it or leave it" until Jan 1st, at which time the offers will expire. The reason for this hard deadline (announced in October) is that L-Soft does not think it is useful to continue the negotiations longer than that. Everything has already been discussed, we are just not agreeing on the prices and conditions. Both parties should have all the necessary elements to make an informed decision, and time is of the essence. At any rate, this means there will be a pretty final answer within 20 days, and an absolutely final one a month later. If an agreement is reached, it will probably take the form of a service license for all CREN sites that were running LISTSERV and/or LMail on Sep 1st, 1993, excluding, of course, sites which left CREN since then. L-Soft has not been asked to make an offer that would include "new" sites. The license would be valid from Dec 1st, 1993 to Jun 30th, 1994, which is the end of CREN's fiscal year. L-Soft was asked to make an offer for (normal) category II service, and one for a special "category III+" level which would include access to new versions and to bug fixes, whereas support would be provided by CREN, presumably in a more cost-effective manner. Under this option, all questions and bug reports would have to go to a CREN-designated helpdesk, which would be responsible for answering questions and passing bug reports that are not disguised "user errors" back to L-Soft for troubleshooting. It should be noted that, under this scenario, L-Soft would not receive any money for technical assistance and would thus provide no technical assistance at all. If the helpdesk failed to answer a particular question, L-Soft would not come to the rescue. After July 1st, people would have the option to get individual licenses through CREN with volume discount. This is actually available whether or not CREN gets a license for Dec-Jun. Basically, any institution willing to send a check in advance on behalf of a large number of customers of the same category (academic in that case), and able to provide a "point of expertise" through which all requests for assistance have to be sent, so that questions that have already been asked can be answered without going back to L-Soft, is entitled to a volume discount. While the rates and exact conditions may change depending on market evolution, the general principle will remain: if you help us cut down our costs, we will reward you with a discount. At any rate, because CREN would only be writing a check on behalf of its members and would not be the organization liable for your use of the software, all member sites will have to agree to L-Soft's licensing conditions, no matter how the products are eventually licensed. In order to save time, you should order a copy of GA9305-2.PS from LISTSERV@SEARN and send it to whoever reviews contracts at your site. A suitable "Schedule A" would be provided in due course if a collective license is issued. On the topic of access to new versions, L-Soft plans to release LMail 1.2a in about a week, possibly two if some PROFS changes we are evaluating are implemented. LISTSERV 1.8a will be released at the beginning of December. EARN sites and US sites with a private service license will get the new versions automatically, as before. The situation is more complicated for sites which do not have a service license at the time the software is released. The "service license" scheme funds development through regular customer payments that can be easily budgeted in advance, as opposed to one-time "upgrade charges" whose amounts and dates of payment are unknown. In order for this to work, the customer must pay continuously even though licenses are only issued from time to time, simply because development and its associated costs are also a continuous process. A customer licensed for 1.7f who gets a service license in July 1994 and wants a copy of the latest version has in fact not paid for the corresponding development costs. If the upgrade from 1.7f to the latest version were free, there would be no incentive to get a service license until you badly need new functionality. To take a concrete example, the license we were negotiating with CREN was originally supposed to start on Nov 1. CREN said it wasn't very realistic due to incompressible administrative delays, and this was moved to Dec 1. Of course when they realized that this decreased the price tag without any drawback other than making people wait a bit more for their copy of the new version, they wanted to push the beginning date further on to save money. It is a legitimate reaction, but one we can't allow as the income pattern would no longer match our expenses, and we'd be giving away several months of work for free. Anyway, as far as individual licenses go, we understand that people have been waiting for the outcome of the CREN/L-Soft negotiations and it would not be fair to charge license upgrades when there was no attempt at "cheating" in the first place. We do however want to give people an incentive to get a license as soon as possible, and not wait until July or whenever users start rioting :-) So we have decided: 1. That there will be no upgrade charge for people ordering a (yearly) license before Feb 1st, 1994. 2. In February, March and April, the upgrade charge will be two months of prorated service charges, ie you will be paying 16.7% extra only. 3. After that, upgrade charges will be calculated normally (service from Dec 1, capped). Note that there is no upgrade charge if you purchase a permanent right to use license to replace the free license tied to your CREN/BITNET membership. In other words, if your management has already decided to leave BITNET, you are mostly unaffected because, assuming you are keeping VM, you will need to get a right to use license for LISTSERV-TCP/IP anyway. You can help expedite things by running contracts and budgets through your management now, so that you are in a position to place an order in January if the CREN/L-Soft negotiations fail to result in a collective license. If we do reach agreement, you will need to have the contracts approved anyway, and the budgeted money will be needed from July 1st. In other words, you are not doing superfluous work, no matter what the final outcome is. Eric