[discussion] Schema of Valentina server licensing

[Charles Yeomans]

On Thursday, June 19, 2003, at 06:31 PM, Lynn Fredricks wrote:

>>> You can continue to buy the next versions of the single user SDKs
>>> outside of this plan. However this plan would include several tiers
>>> that include either one "Pro" version of an SDK (such as
>> V4RB for Mac,
>>> V4RB for Windows), C++ SDK, or all of the SDKs, plus the ability to
>>> distribute royalty free 5 connection server apps. The subscription
>>> style
>>> would limit the time you could distribute new server applications to
>>> having a paid up subscription. But you'd also get free
>> upgrades to the
>>> covered products during that time.
>>
>> As I see it, the point of a subscription model is to decouple the
>> revenue stream from the development cycle.  And I can see that such a
>> plan has some advantages for us as well as Paradigma.  But a
>> time-limited subscription model asks us to assume all of the
>> risk.  In
>> short, I wouldn't purchase a license that time-limited my ability to
>> sell software.
>
> Please go into more detail. The point to this is that for the duration
> (Im thinking 2 years initially with 1 or 2 year renewals), you are
> getting technology upgrades to the covered products and also the right
> to continue to deploy those royalty free 5 connection servers. Another
> consideration is that at the end of an unrenewed subscription, you 
> could
> continue to buy additional 5 connection deployments and ala carte
> everything.

As I understand it, what you're proposing is that I purchase a 
subscription for the embedded version of VServer.  I then spend 
hundreds or thousands of hours writing software that uses it.  At the 
end of the VServer subscription period, if I fail to renew, then I can 
no longer use this embedded VServer -- which effectively means that I 
can't sell my software any more.  Is this an accurate description of 
what you have in mind?

As for "technology upgrades", what the subscription model means is that 
Paradigma is getting all of your money upfront for the next N 
"technology upgrades", which may or may not occur. So what I could well 
be paying for is some period of nothing but bug fixes that attempt to 
provide the software I thought I was purchasing originally.

Real Software, another apparent convert to a subscription model, has 
now gone one year since releasing a reliable major upgrade to 
REALbasic, although it looks like 5.2 may be that upgrade.  It seems to 
me that one advantage of subscription-based licensing is that it allows 
RS to do something big like implement a new compiler instead of 
continuing to patch the old code because they are unable or unwilling 
to spend the effort on the new compiler.  But if I were forced to pay 
in the interim to continue selling software I developed in 4.5, I'd be 
digging into Cocoa.


>
> Something else I want to toss in here -- there are going to be some
> other benefits as well. For example, a modest set of initial 
> connections
> that come with the subscription. My thinking with this is that the 
> value
> of those additional connections should offset a fair amount of the 
> price
> of the initial two year subscription.
>
>> But from my perspective, and from Keith's, Valentina is a REALbasic
>> product.
>
> Do you mean the V4RB component and its successors, Embedded Server,
> Valentina 2 Server or all of the above?
>

I mean that I don't use Director, or VB, or Delphi, or MetaCard. I do 
pretty much all of my development in REALbasic.  I am interested in 
VServer for use internally in my wife's law firm.  But it looks like I 
can use MySQL for free.

Charles Yeomans