[discussion] Schema of Valentina server licensing

[Charles Yeomans]

On Thursday, June 19, 2003, at 07:38 PM, Ruslan Zasukhin wrote:

> on 6/20/03 2:17, Charles Yeomans at yeomans at desuetude.com wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Yes Charles,
>
> I agree that it is bad if you or me pay money on future but company 
> foolish
> you.
>
> I hope that after my last letter where I point that price of VDN will 
> be
> MUCH less of the price of goods that you get IMMIDALTY (!!!) you 
> doubts will
> go away.
>
> Yes?

No.  Because I don't know how much the subscription fee will be in the 
future.  I've certainly seen Windows developer friends of mine get 
screwed when their $300 license jumps to $2500 + runtime fees.  So, as 
I noted in another message, prudence suggests that I any application I 
write using VServer would need to be designed so that I can change db 
engines as easily as possible -- and that may or may not be so easy to 
do.

Charles Yeomans