[discussion] Schema of Valentina server licensing

[Lynn Fredricks]

Sorry for the delay in responding, this all started pretty late
yesterday...

> > 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.

Absolutely. There are no guarantees, unless in writing, when a company
is going to ship a paid for upgrade. And I agree, there are some
upgrades that seem to be worthless and seem arbitrary. For this reason,
many people are skeptical about the value of subscriptions.

The value of paid for subscriptions really depends on the risk
associated with the chance to get a feature that can provide profound
value to you during the lifetime of the subscription.


> 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.

Im a little lost on your meaning with the compiler. The old compiler was
replaced for a number of reasons, some of the most provocative of which
are not really public. The old compiler and the relationship of the old
compiler to the IDE had some severe problems for future growth and
stability. The new compiler is more abstracted from the IDE, so its less
likely that your results in testing *within* the IDE will vary from the
final compiled product. It doesn't sound sexy at all, but at the same
time, it reduces a lot of frustration and irritating extra testing and
tweaking when the two don't have the same behavior.


> > 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.

Provided that your arent doing commercial work with it, are happy with
its features and can reply solely on community support, then yes, its
kind of free.

If all you need is to take care of your wife's law firm, why not buy a
low connection Valentina 2 Server, then use the non-runtime client
plugins to make her a custom solution?

Best regards,


Lynn Fredricks
President
Proactive International, LLC

http://www.proactive-intl.com