In the past few weeks, we have been receiving a number of requests for clarifications regarding the CREN/L-Soft contract, and, more recently, CREN's announcement of the 50% discount on L-Soft maintenance. Now some customers are referring to incorrect licensing information which they claim to have received from BITNIC. While I am sure it is just a misunderstanding, I think the time has come to post all the clarifications in a single message. I apologize for the length, but I thought it was best to have all the necessary details in a single file, for the sake of simplicitly. Disclaimer: While, to the best of our knowledge, all the facts in this message are accurate, it is not possible to sum up a formal contract or announcement in a few lines without omitting a lot of information, and the process of turning 30 pages of legalese into a 50-line English summary is necessarily error-prone. Thus, the legally binding text is that of the contracts and announcements described in this message. L-Soft international Inc. ("L-Soft" in this document) does not represent or warrant that the condensed information in the present message is accurate, or that the shortened terms will be honoured by L-Soft or other parties. ***************************** * The CREN/L-Soft agreement * ***************************** The CREN/L-Soft agreement provides that CREN members that were running LISTSERV and/or LMail on September 1, 1993 may apply for FREE support and maintenance through June 30, 1994. The support is free to you because CREN paid for it on your behalf. While the contract states that "CREN may make any charge upon the Licensed Member as CREN solely elects", CREN later made public statements to the effect that this would NOT apply to the Dec 1 - Jun 30 period. Thus there is nothing to pay, and no commitment from you to pay anything in the future. This is also a good way to get the current versions while the purchasing department is working on your PO for next year. In addition, the CREN/L-Soft agreement provides that CREN members who did the above and who also extend their CREN membership for another year may apply for support and maintenance for the period Jul 94 - Jun 95 with a discount of up to 50%, based on the number of copies CREN will end up ordering. The CREN board recently decided to guarantee the maximal discount of 50% to its members, which means that you will receive a 50% discount regardless of the price CREN ends up paying. Note that this does not mean CREN is going to pay half of your bill. CREN only needs some 30-40 sites (depending on the exact product combinations) to receive the full 50% discount from L-Soft. CREN is taking the risk and incertitude away from you by agreeing to pay the difference, should there be too little sites renewing their maintenance through CREN to receive the 50% discount from L-Soft. The maximum cost to CREN, for the entire network, is $9,670.50, and indeed L-Soft had suggested that CREN make this guarantee from day one, in order to facilitate purchasing. This volume discount is financed through reduced costs to L-Soft - less bills to handle, of course, but above all reduced support costs. When you purchase maintenance through CREN, you receive support from the CREN help desk at BITNIC ([log in to unmask]), rather than from L-Soft's support team ([log in to unmask]). When the CREN help desk finds a bug in the code, it submits a problem report to L-Soft and we prepare a fix, and of course you get the same code regardless of who you purchase maintenance from. When you just have a question or need assistance in solving a configuration problem, however, it is the CREN help desk that is responsible for answering your query. For the sake of completeness, I will note that the CREN/L-Soft contract also includes a number of price guarantees for the purchase of various L-Soft products. These prices are higher than what we charge other academic (non-CREN) customers, so we usually do not even mention this section of the CREN/L-Soft agreement. ****************** * CREN vs L-Soft * ****************** A few days after the signature of the CREN/L-Soft agreement, CREN announced that it had purchased the rights to the unix list manager package known as ListProc, and planned to further develop it. Each non-profit CREN member will receive one free license, for use on a single computer of any size. Additional copies will be at a charge, and the software will also be sold to for-profit CREN members, and to organizations which are not CREN members. What this means concretely is that CREN and L-Soft are competitors since the date this announcement was posted (March 18, 1994) - and even more so since the announcement of the unix version of LISTSERV on May 4. The provisions of the CREN/L-Soft contract are a legacy, much like the contract between IBM and Microsoft regarding access to Windows code. The reason I am pointing this out so explicitly is that it makes it easier to understand the various offers and tell incorrect information from genuine offers. There is no partnership between CREN and L-Soft. If someone tells you there is an L-Soft package (other than the maintenance agreement in the CREN/L-Soft contract) which is only available to CREN members that opt to retain their CREN membership, that person is misinformed. There are indeed a number of packages available only to CREN members, but their purpose is to provide a cost-effective alternative to the services CREN is offering. There is nothing hidden here, just the same healthy competition that helps keeping the prices down in the rest of the computer industry. The customer compares costs and value, and chooses the vendor that best meets his price and functionality requirements. ******************* * LISTSERV-TCP/IP * ******************* LISTSERV-TCP/IP is one of the solutions we offer sites that wish to leave BITNET, but retain the LISTSERV benefits they have enjoyed while they were on BITNET. LISTSERV-TCP/IP is a superset of "LISTSERV Classic" that does not require NJE connectivity, but is otherwise totally compatible. If you have plans to keep VM for the next couple years, this is probably the best migration alternative. LISTSERV-TCP/IP was not included in the CREN/L-Soft contract and is thus only available from L-Soft. Since there have been discussions between CREN and L-Soft about adding LISTSERV-TCP/IP maintenance to the CREN contract in the few days between the signature of that contract and the ListProc announcement, you may have heard another explanation, possibly even from an L-Soft employee. Once CREN became our competitor, we of course decided to end the embryonic partnership we had started, and did not pursue that issue any further. ******************** * LISTSERV for VMS * ******************** In addition to its obvious usefulness to VMS-only shops, LISTSERV for VMS is an interesting migration alternative for sites that must part with their mainframe systems, but have local VMS expertise and wish to retain NJE. LISTSERV for VMS comes with full support for NJE (although you can run it in TCP/IP mode if you prefer). We have made good progress on the beta-testing and are down to programming around a couple UCX oddities, testing the software with PMDF, and packaging it properly. LISTSERV for VMS is only available from L-Soft. ********************* * LISTSERV for unix * ********************* Another alternative for sites that must phase out their mainframe systems is LISTSERV for unix. Here too we have made good progress, and are down to theological debates on the best way to interface the system to sendmail, what kind of site-customizable interfaces to provide to accomodate sendmail variants, and similar time-consuming but fairly predictable problems. We are also testing the code on all sorts of unixes to find out how difficult it would be to support them, and so far we haven't had to change any code (only compilation scripts, makefiles and the like). We remain firmly convinced that, from the technical point of view, we can support just about any 32-bit unix with a socket interface and either gcc or a robust ANSI compiler. There is a special package for CREN sites offering an indefinite license plus one year of support for 75% of your FY'93 CREN membership. This offer does NOT require you to extend your CREN membership, it is just a run of the mill price war. CREN is offering one free copy of their unix list manager to people who renew their CREN membership, presumably as an incentive for members that have decided to leave NJE and phase out their VM systems to retain their CREN membership nonetheless. We believe our unix product offers a lot more functionality and investment protection than ListProc, and we are making it available at a fraction of the CREN membership fee in order to show that L-Soft gives you more for less. The 75% offer is only available for the unix version, because CREN's product is only available for unix. The VM and VMS market present different challenges, which we will address with other promotional offers that better meet the needs of VM/VMS customers. For instance, we will offer migration plans from VM to either VMS or unix, and clusterwide gradated (pay-per-capacity) licenses for VMS. ********************************************************************* * Why does L-Soft push the CREN/L-Soft contract's free maintenance? * ********************************************************************* The reason L-Soft encouraged its customers to take advantage of the CREN/L-Soft contract's free maintenance, in spite of the ListProc announcement, is that it makes it possible for you to receive the latest version of the software while your purchase department and/or budgeting officers are working on a stable solution for next year. We want people to run the latest version so that they can take advantage of the latest improvements and see for themselves that maintenance dollars are being put to good use, and hopefully sign up for another year of maintenance from L-Soft. For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that L-Soft will owe CREN a credit on July 8th by the amount of "unused" free maintenance points. "Earning" the license points is only a secondary concern, because with the legal complications caused by the "charge any amount" and "master agreement takes precedence" clauses, plus the administrative problems caused by the lack of a firm price for CREN-procured maintenance for next year (before the recent board announcement), we expect that most of the paperwork will fail to meet the July 1st deadline. To date, only 16 out of 160-odd nodes have returned the paperwork, and several sites decided to place an order directly with L-Soft rather than go through the aggravation of fighting their legal department. Thus we expect to owe CREN a bigger credit than they can actually use on next year's maintenance, which the CREN/L-Soft contract only permits if you signed up before the deadline. The remainder of the credit can only be used on non-transferable licenses, maintenance or other services in CREN's name, which are not very useful to CREN and thus not a concern to us. ************************************ * Why get maintenance from L-Soft? * ************************************ L-Soft recommends that you procure maintenance for L-Soft products directly from L-Soft, not because we make more money on a direct purchase but because CREN is our competitor, and they are directly involved in the provision of the service you are purchasing (CREN staff answers your questions). Getting LISTSERV support from CREN would be like purchasing VMS support from Sun or IBM. Without questioning the integrity of the individuals providing such support, the plain business reality is that it would not be in the service provider's corporate interest to do a good job, as they would sell more copies of their products if they are better supported than the competition's. In the corporate world, this would not be a serious concern as the customers would quickly revert to the original vendor. In the academic world, however, budgets are made in Spring for the entire year, and it can prove very difficult, if not utterly impossible, to get any money afterwards. In order to show that our concern is genuine, we will give you the same 50% discount you would get through CREN if you agree not to extend your CREN membership past July 1st. We will actually make less money, since your questions will be answered by L-Soft staff rather than CREN staff, but we will not have to worry about being dependent on a competitor's goodwill for our corporate image. This offer applies to any CPU listed in Schedule A of the CREN/L-Soft contract, for the corresponding products - even if you do not manage to return the paperwork by the deadline. It is not cumulative with other discounts unless that is explicitly stated. *************************************** * Long term prospects (business case) * *************************************** The CREN/L-Soft agreement is a one-time complication, because it does not extend past June 30, 1995 (the original contract does not even include an option for renewal). Thus there is no question that, if you wish to keep using L-Soft products, you will eventually need to procure licenses and services directly from L-Soft. Now is the best time to do so, as the existence of this contract forces us to make a number of promotional offers to protect our corporate integrity. In one year, we expect that our VMS, unix and (future) NT versions of LISTSERV will have reached the same level of functionality as the VM version, with, of course, full and uncompromising compatibility. We will be in a position of force with no business reason to make special offers for CREN FY'95 members. NJE will probably be in its last throes, and people will desperately need to purchase LISTSERV-TCP/IP, or then one of the non-VM versions, because the users will demand that the service be continued while the upstream nodes will be reminding people that they are leaving in two months. This is not the kind of market that is conducive to special promotional offers; it is the kind of situation where you just tell people what the list price is, and wait for the users to form a mob outside their office if they object that it was cheaper last year. L-Soft offers you a smooth migration path from NJE to TCP/IP, and from VM to either VMS, unix, or, in the future, Windows NT. Because our products have a very high degree of compatibility and interoperate across heterogeneous environments, you can migrate your workload from one system to the other at the pace that is most appropriate for your users. For instance, you may have a number of high-volume administrative lists for which database access is not required, and whose users do not use the file server functions other than for retrieving list archives. Moving these lists from VM to VMS or unix is as easy as running FTP to move a few files around. There is nothing to change, the messages are strictly identical, and, in fact, most users are unlikely to notice the move if you set up the necessary mail aliases. Later, when the database functions are ported to the non-VM versions, you can use the same simple procedure to migrate the remaining lists and phase out the VM service. No other vendors offers you this degree of control over your migration; in the best case, there will be a document with migration advice and a FAQ for the victims, in the worst case nothing at all. L-Soft is the only vendor to offer a list manager implemented on multiple operating systems. This, combined with the fact that LISTSERV has been around since 1986 and has the largest user base of any list manager, makes it the most likely candidate for standardization. L-Soft sees standardization as an inevitable step in the evolution of LISTSERV, just as the migration to a portable code base with unix, VMS and (in the future) Windows NT products was inevitable. Our competitors failed to impose their syntax, interface and protocols as even draft Internet standards when LISTSERV was at its weakest, being available only on highly expensive and unfashionable IBM mainframes. Now that LISTSERV is portable while competing products only run on a single environment, the likelihood of seeing a competitor's product turn into an Internet standard is virtually zero. Even if that happens, the sheer size of the LISTSERV user community is your guarantee of a smooth migration path. When evaluating the various list managers, a useful approach is to step back from all the announcements and feature lists and offers, and take a few moments to consider the reasons why you are purchasing a list manager in the first place. In most cases, there is an element of time, money or manpower in the answer: the list manager saves a few minutes a day, every day, for the thousands of (non-technical) people that it helps bringing together. In addition, the list manager saves a lot of time for the technical staff that would otherwise have to perform unmotivating, error-prone clerical tasks. But a user-hostile list manager can actually cost you money! As the users have to spend 15 minutes calling a help desk every time they have a problem, you would quickly lose a lot of manpower and thus money, even though you might have saved some by installing a free list manager available via anonymous FTP. Most non-technical users do not know how to use their computer effectively, and are not willing to learn complicated computer concepts in order to use a product. Instead of learning things that intimidate them, they will waste precious time using simpler techniques that they have already mastered; for instance, your average user will retype 30 addresses by hand, with two fingers, rather than learn about regular expressions, for fear of making a mistake and "destroying everything". A good test of the suitability of a mailing list manager is the degree of technical knowledge that it requires of list owners. If list owners are assumed to be familiar with perl, awk, regular expressions and other unix concepts, you can be sure that most computer-shy owners will be frightened and give up, or run their list on a more user-friendly list manager at another university. This in turn would increase your support costs dramatically, as your users would be exposed to incompatible systems in their everyday work. The single largest cost in the operation of a typical list manager is the investment in user training and the resulting helpdesk and end-user manpower costs. The cost of an indefinite LISTSERV license being on the order of one month of salary + overhead for a single employee, it is just not cost effective to run a user-hostile package just because it was free, or, even worse, to switch a happy LISTSERV user population to a user-hostile package and incur manpower losses at least an order of magnitude higher than the cost of the license.