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