Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!indri!aplcen!jhunix!ecf_stbo
From: ecf_stbo@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Tom B O'toole)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec
Subject: Re: DIBOL alternatives?
Message-ID: <1774@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>
Date: 12 May 89 14:16:21 GMT
References: <10547@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <1850@td2cad.intel.com> <10591@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Reply-To: ecf_stbo@jhunix.UUCP (Tom B O'toole)
Distribution: usa
Organization: The Johns Hopkins University - HCF
Lines: 32

In article <10591@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> tim@cit-vax.UUCP (Timothy L. Kay) writes:
> What really gets me is
>that DEC is charging a per-user licensing.  When I buy a carton of ice
>cream, I pay the same amount of money whether one person or twelve are
>going to eat from it.  For somebody to charge varying amounts of money
>for the *same* product just because I use it in a different manor than
   Well, I agree that the per user license prices are pretty out there, but so
are the unlimited use license prices! DEC is going to have to be careful
of pricing themselves out of the market, with software more so than hardware.
I must disagree with your statement above however. Why should a site with
only a few users have to pay the same amount for a software product as a
large company which has hundreds of users using the same product as the main
application? At academic sites where I have been employed, you can often get
nice discounts, but you still get killed when they base software price on 
CPU type.
  
 An academic site usually doesn't have a few applications that every
user runs, but many different ones, to try to accomodate the different users
needs. When just a very few users need a particular product, the site must
often do without, although the purchase could have been justified if there
was a per-user license available. To my eyes, CPU type pricing is much
more unfair than per-user pricing. It seems to be based on the "deep-pockets"
theory: "Let's take 'em to the cleaners because they bought a bigger machine",
rather than any kind of estimate of usage. Perhaps the only thing that screws
the consumer more is software that checks the SID register (whoa, don't get me
started....). Software isn't ice cream and shouldn't be purchased that way.

-- 
Tom O'Toole - ecf_stbo@jhuvms.bitnet
JHUVMS system programmer          Guess we should'a bought that fan belt
Homewood Computing Facilities     here Rick; it would have been a lot cheaper.
Johns Hopkins University, Balto. Md. 21218                -Rascal Reporters