On Tue, 7 Dec 1993 06:55:25 PST Dave Gomberg <[log in to unmask]> said: >Does the latest post from BITNIC mean they have decided against L-Soft? Speaking only for myself, I see the latest post from BITNIC as yet another outrageous attempt at taking credit for LISTSERV on the assumption that I will look the other way to avoid jeopardizing the CREN/L-Soft negotiations. Speaking now for L-Soft, this is a serious business offense as this was actually a printed brochure used in a PR context at the EDUCOM conference. After reading this brochure, some potential L-Soft customers (such as your own bosses) may get the incorrect assumption that CREN is the entity doing all the good work on LISTSERV and send CREN a check when they really thought they were subsidizing the makers of LISTSERV. This might be tolerable if CREN had been L-Soft's business partner at the time the brochure was distributed and we could at least count on getting a fraction of that check in the form of license fees. But we don't even know whether CREN will ever decide to become L-Soft's business partner, so this is simply not tolerable and we are currently discussing what is the best way to respond to this. We will probably send mail to all the people we expect to have received a copy of said brochure with some clarifications in a neutral tone. It suppose it will be lost in the Christmas mail flood but it will at least make it clear to CREN that we will not tolerate such abuse in the future. >They say something like: We will port the features of LISTSERV to an >open platform... in their list of things to do. Sure, but they also say they will migrate the current LISTSERV backbone to IP, which is clearly something only L-Soft can do (ie this refers to LISTSERV-TCP/IP). If CREN developed new software it wouldn't be "migrating the current LISTSERV backbone", it would be something new. In my opinion there is no relationship between the brochure and the CREN negotiations. If you'll just ignore the misleading language about LISTSERV, the brochure is entirely in line with previous papers and statements about CREN's strategy (which actually were already on the borderline with regard to LISTSERV). The CREN negotiations are creeping on in the same sinuous patterns as one month or two months ago. I believe CREN is about to go to the board with a proposal which I would say has a 50% chance of being approved. Roughly speaking, the proposal (made in October) offers service licenses to CREN members at a 50% discount and with price+terms guaranteed for 19 months, on the condition that CREN collect the money and pay L-Soft in advance with a single check, that volume exceed 50 units, and that CREN purchase maintenance from Dec 1st, 1993 (that date was actually set in October under the assumption that the contract would be signed well before December...) The BITNIC-provided maintenance option has been dropped in the course of the negotiations, so we are talking about a straight discount on L-Soft provided services. L-Soft benefits by receiving payment right away for the many sites which would otherwise not be able to pay before this spring, for budget related reasons. With this money we would be able to hire people to write documentation, which otherwise will not be possible until next summer, and another programmer to work on other projects such as L-Gopher or L-SMTP. Funding for LISTSERV development, customer support, the initial phases of the porting effort and the off-the-shelf mailing list service has already been secured and earmarked, so there is no need for you to be worried. We are even on schedule for the porting effort :-) With the release of 1.8a today, all the steps in the 1993 table of GM-9308-1 have been carried out. I also heard yesterday that GNU is working on a PASCAL compiler, which depending on the specifics may or may perhaps not facilitate the unix development. Eric