Pursuant to section 6 of the CREN/L-Soft contract, CREN has informed us that the following 14 "Licensed Members" would be extending their LISTSERV and/or LMail maintenance via CREN through June 1995: AUVM GWUVM IUBVM LATECH NIHLIST OCC PSUORVM PSUVM TEMPLEVM UGA UHCCVM UIUCVMD UIUCVM42 UMSLVMA If you are on the list, CREN will send you a bill and you will receive support through the CREN helpdesk until June 30, 1995, with L-Soft providing second-level support under the terms of the CREN/L-Soft agreement. Note that CREN did not include BITNIC on the list. Thus, it looks like the CREN helpdesk will not have access to the current versions of LISTSERV and LMail (they can always purchase support separately, but this sounds unlikely). If you had notified CREN of your desire to extend your LISTSERV and/or LMail support through them, but are not on the list, it means that we either did not receive your contract on time (or had to return it because of a mistake or a change we could not accept), or that CREN did not put you on the "Extending Members" list they mailed us on June 30 and amended on July 1. Since July 1 was the deadline for CREN to send us such notifications (section 6), it is too late to change things, except in one case: CREN gave us a list of 4 sites that wished to extend their support through CREN, but whose contracts were still in the mail. One of them arrived on July 1 and has been added to the extending list. We will do the same with the other 3 if we receive the contracts before July 8 (the CREN/L-Soft contract requires us to formally issue a credit to CREN on or before July 8, so we cannot possibly add sites after that date). Please do not resend or FAX the contracts - pursuant to section 4, they must be postmarked on or before June 30 in order to be acceptable. If you are not on the extending list (or even if you are), you can purchase support directly from L-Soft at the same price. This eliminates an intermediary, and greatly simplifies the paperwork your lawyers have to review. We have never had any problem with our maintenance contract when it was not associated with the CREN contract (at least not with US academic customers). Purchase lawyers are simply not used to three-party agreements like the CREN/L-Soft/member contract suite, and of course people are generally wary of deals that purport to offer something for free if you will just sign a 30-page contract within a short time frame :-) Now that we are back to a classical two-party purchase situation, this should no longer be a problem. You can get a copy of the "standalone" maintenance agreement by sending a GET VM_MNT PS command to [log in to unmask] The file includes instructions and the exhibit is pre-filled for LISTSERV+LMail. We are still negotiating with CREN on the issue of releasing 1.8a to all the CREN members that did not manage to push the paperwork past legal review on time. Because of the unfortunate use of the word "executed" rather than "agreed" in section 4, we had no option but to request CREN's written permission to advance beneficiaries to Licensed Member status without a written Member Agreement. In spite of the fact that it was clearly the intent of the contract to release the software to all the beneficiaries, and that section 4 was added only for L-Soft's protection, we would be breaching the contract if we advanced the remaining sites without CREN's written permission. We thought that obtaining CREN's authorization would be a simple formality, since it is clearly in the interest of CREN's members to receive 1.8a and become LTCP-exploitive, but unfortunately it turned out to be a lot more complicated than we expected. L-Soft remains totally committed to making the current LISTSERV backbone LTCP-exploitive by the end of the month. If we do not succeed in convincing CREN to let us deliver 1.8a to all CREN members at our own risk, we will retrofit the LTCP exploitation code into 1.7f and deliver a free FIX17FT update within the month, using the 1.7f licensing agreement between Eric Thomas and the various LISTSERV sites. Our LTCP customers need not worry about bad surprises. The lack of LTCP exploitation impacts mostly the remaining LNJE sites, whose load will increase as they cannot take advantage of the LTCP servers. Thus, even if for some reason we failed to make the backbone LTCP-exploitive, this would only make it more attractive for LNJE sites to migrate to LTCP. Eric