Re: It costs how much?!!?!

[LC's No-Spam Newsreading account <nospam(at)ifctr.mi.cnr.it>]

On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Mark Rivers wrote:

>  Unix $200 per machine

In Italy the cost of a maintenance contract for a Unix floating license
is 375 euro (included 35% academic discount), about double than that.

> This would include maintenance and upgrades through the year 2001 (and yes,

We are not particularly interested in upgrades (whether they are
introduction of new bells and whistles, or dropping useful features like
the GIF creation in 5.4, my colleagues refused to have 5.4 installed),
we would be interested in bugfixes, but haven't really seen a serious
bug in IDL.

Concerning "maintenance" that essentially means the right to receive a
new license file in the eventuality we junk the old license server
machine. Just done that (on current year contract :-) ).

> I think these are very reasonable rates.

Considered the above, I'd regard them as quite high. I'm not sure we'll
renew a contract for 8 licenses, or freeze them.

I would be more in favour of a "per usage" accounting. You pay a lump
sum, get a license file for so many hours of CPU usage (not connection,
of course), get a warning when you have used 90%, and at that time ask
for a new offer, and place a new order.

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