| Re: New IDL Update Policy [message #1079] |
Mon, 07 June 1993 08:31 |
bowman
Messages: 121
Registered: September 1991
|
Senior Member |
|
|
I think that RSI's new update policy is perfectly understandable. They are
in the business to make money, they have a good product, and they can
charge what they want. I think that their past policy of free updates
(sans support) has been exceedingly generous. I am happy to pay the
$250/year fee for updates, although I would rather not have to pay the $200
for support. I have used support in the past only for help with some
undocumented features (CALL_EXTERNAL on the RS6000, for which a document
now exists), and I like to think I have helped RSI by reporting some bugs.
RSI has been one of the best software companies that I have ever had to
deal with, and I strongly recommend it to friends. (Perhaps I should ask
for a commission, since the Meteorology Dept. has bought a license, and I
think Lassen Research is switching their commercial turnkey radar display
software to IDL because of me. :-) )
The price for new licenses, however, has pretty much moved out of our price
range (for research grants to universities). We would like to buy a 6-user
node locked license ($4,500), since floating licenses and unlimited
licenses are way out of reach, but we will have to wait. There are people
in our immediate group, and in the department, who would like to use IDL,
but I cannot support them on my single machine. Maybe next year we will
have the funds. If floating licenses or node-locked licenses were $500
each, we could buy several and add others as needed. I don't know whether
RSI could make money at that price, but in our case they would make
something rather than nothing.
------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------
Dr. Kenneth P. Bowman 409-862-4060
Climate System Research Program 409-862-4132 fax
Department of Meteorology bowman@csrp.tamu.edu
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77843-3150
|
|
|
|
| Re: New IDL Update Policy [message #1080 is a reply to message #1079] |
Sun, 06 June 1993 13:17  |
thompson
Messages: 584
Registered: August 1991
|
Senior Member |
|
|
scowen@wfpc3.uucp (Paul A. Scowen) writes:
(stuff deleted)
> ... In fact,
> having now used the UNIX IDL and since it does *not* support anything useful
> like dynamic linking of C code and the like, ..
This is not entirely a true statement. IDL is able to support dynamic linking
of C and FORTRAN code on *some* UNIX platforms. I'm doing it on my Sun
workstation. DEC ULTRIX workstations are a notable exception, but I've been
told this is a failing in ULTRIX rather than in IDL, and should be corrected
with OSF/1.
Bill Thompson
|
|
|
|
| Re: New IDL Update Policy [message #1081 is a reply to message #1080] |
Sun, 06 June 1993 10:45 |
scowen
Messages: 11
Registered: December 1992
|
Junior Member |
|
|
This whole upgrade/maintenance business with RSI is a crock.
I've just been pricing stuff for a suite of 3 DEC Alphas we're considering
buying here at ASU, and have found out very interesting new pricing
information that the majority of IDL users out there may not know about.
Last week most of us received letters from the kind folk at RSI indicating
that it would cost us around $450 to upgrade our DEC 5000's to v3.1 (that's
the sticker price for all DEC machines because RSI says they're having
problems with DEC as a vendor finding bug solutions" - why this cost has to
be passed on to the customer because they're employing people who can't find
the solutions themselves I don't know...) *as well as* the $200 for continued
maintenance which now has to be through *one* person per site if you want to
keep the costs down. Anway, since we're purchasing new machines I wanted to
get pricing on licenses for the new architectures.
I was told that "oh, they're (licenses for the Alpha OSF/1, available now)
available for the same price that licenses are now". This sounded nice until
I asked for a written quote. Last year we purchased node-locked multi user
licenses for $1500 per platform. The educational price of the same licenses
now is somewhere around $7300 ($15000 list)!!!! For our budgeted $1500 we
can only get the one node/one user license. This is getting way out of
control.
RSI is now embarked upon a policy that will probably price them out of the
market. We're especially annoyed here since in the last 6-12 months we have
invested a lot of time and effort developing software for the IDL environment
only to find that it's going to cost us major $$$'s just to stay current and
be able to continue using our code. Of course the obvious solution is say
"screw it" and stay with our current configuration, but it prevents us from
using the Alphas as IDL platforms. The quoted improvements in IDL v3.1 over
v3.0 are to say the least minimal (I think "a better contouring algorithm"
was the most attractive one - hardly worth that much money guys). In fact,
having now used the UNIX IDL and since it does *not* support anything useful
like dynamic linking of C code and the like, there's absolutely no way we can
justify spending $7300 to equip our platforms in the way we'd need.
This has caused, to my knowledge, many people who have been using IDL for
some years now with some success to consider other options for interactive
environments. Personally speaking I'm thinking about diving in to KHOROS and
developing object oriented packages through that (public domain) package.
I'd be interested to hear the views of other longer term IDL users with
regard to this, since in these rather tight financial times we cannot afford
to go blowing our valuable research $$$'s on ill-thought pricing campaigns.
--
------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------
Paul A. Scowen INTERNET: scowen@wfpc3.la.asu.edu
Department of Physics & Astronomy Paul.Scowen@asu.edu
Arizona State University SPAN: PHYAST::SCOWEN
Box 871504 Bitnet: Scowen@asu
Tempe, AZ 85287-1504 Tel: (602) 965-0938
USA FAX: (602) 965-7954
------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------
--
------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------
Paul A. Scowen INTERNET: scowen@wfpc3.la.asu.edu
Department of Physics & Astronomy Paul.Scowen@asu.edu
Arizona State University SPAN: PHYAST::SCOWEN
Box 871504 Bitnet: Scowen@asu
Tempe, AZ 85287-1504 Tel: (602) 965-0938
USA FAX: (602) 965-7954
------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------
|
|
|
|
| Re: New IDL Update Policy [message #1082 is a reply to message #1081] |
Fri, 04 June 1993 13:00 |
thompson
Messages: 584
Registered: August 1991
|
Senior Member |
|
|
thompson@serts.gsfc.nasa.gov (William Thompson) writes:
> zawodny@arbd0.larc.nasa.gov (Dr. Joseph M Zawodny) writes:
>> In article <3JUN199323510462@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov> landsman@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov (Wayne Landsman (301)-286-3625) writes:
>>>
>>> I believe that the new policy for RSI is that one must have a current
>>> maintenance license in order to update to Version 3.1. There are no
>>> discounts for multiple licenses.
>>>
>>> I wonder how many people will not bother to upgrade to the new IDL
>>> version in order to avoid paying maintenance costs (which come out to about
>>> $10K per year for our Vax cluster).
>>>
>>> --Wayne Landsman landsman@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov
>>>
>> When I read the new policy, it said that you have to have current
>> software maintenance for each license. So if you are networked with a 7
>> session license it costs the same as a single node locked. If this is not the
>> case then the letter I received was poorly worded.
>> It will be interesting to find out what this is really going to cost
>> (Especially since we have a site license for PV-Wave here!).
>> --
>> Joseph M. Zawodny (KO4LW) NASA Langley Research Center
>> Internet: zawodny@arbd0.larc.nasa.gov MS-475, Hampton VA, 23681-0001
>> Packet: ko4lw@wb0tax.va.usa
> I guess that's fine if you're using network licenses from a single license
> manager, but we've been using IDL so long that most of our licenses are the
> original unlimited node-locked kind, and I believe that all the ones we've been
> buying since then for various clustered workstations have also been
> node-locked. Our problem is that we have lots of small licenses instead of
> just a few big licenses.
Sorry to follow up myself, but I wanted to say more clearly that what truly
concerns me about the new maintenance policy is the lack of a discount for
multiple licenses. This particularly disturbs me in connection with IDL for
Windows, since that would be something that one could conceivably buy a bunch
of small copies for individuals, where before one would buy a single more
expensive copy that would service a whole bunch of people. The fact that we've
not been in the habit of buying floating network licenses also seems to work
against us, in a way that doesn't seem to me to be fair.
Most of the software that I've seen in the workstation world prices it's
maintenance as a percentage of the original price of the software. Thus if you
got a multi-license discount when you bought the software, you would get the
same discount on the yearly maintenance costs. (On the other hand, telephone
support is often priced differently, with less consistency from company to
company, but generally depending on the number of contacts, and sometimes
factoring in the number of licenses, and sometimes not.)
Bill Thompson
|
|
|
|
| Re: New IDL Update Policy [message #1083 is a reply to message #1082] |
Fri, 04 June 1993 06:55 |
thompson
Messages: 584
Registered: August 1991
|
Senior Member |
|
|
zawodny@arbd0.larc.nasa.gov (Dr. Joseph M Zawodny) writes:
> In article <3JUN199323510462@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov> landsman@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov (Wayne Landsman (301)-286-3625) writes:
>>
>> I believe that the new policy for RSI is that one must have a current
>> maintenance license in order to update to Version 3.1. There are no
>> discounts for multiple licenses.
>>
>> I wonder how many people will not bother to upgrade to the new IDL
>> version in order to avoid paying maintenance costs (which come out to about
>> $10K per year for our Vax cluster).
>>
>> --Wayne Landsman landsman@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov
>>
> When I read the new policy, it said that you have to have current
> software maintenance for each license. So if you are networked with a 7
> session license it costs the same as a single node locked. If this is not the
> case then the letter I received was poorly worded.
> It will be interesting to find out what this is really going to cost
> (Especially since we have a site license for PV-Wave here!).
> --
> Joseph M. Zawodny (KO4LW) NASA Langley Research Center
> Internet: zawodny@arbd0.larc.nasa.gov MS-475, Hampton VA, 23681-0001
> Packet: ko4lw@wb0tax.va.usa
I guess that's fine if you're using network licenses from a single license
manager, but we've been using IDL so long that most of our licenses are the
original unlimited node-locked kind, and I believe that all the ones we've been
buying since then for various clustered workstations have also been
node-locked. Our problem is that we have lots of small licenses instead of
just a few big licenses.
Bill Thompson
|
|
|
|
| Re: New IDL Update Policy [message #1085 is a reply to message #1083] |
Fri, 04 June 1993 04:44 |
zawodny
Messages: 121
Registered: August 1992
|
Senior Member |
|
|
In article <3JUN199323510462@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov> landsman@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov (Wayne Landsman (301)-286-3625) writes:
>
> I believe that the new policy for RSI is that one must have a current
> maintenance license in order to update to Version 3.1. There are no
> discounts for multiple licenses.
>
> I wonder how many people will not bother to upgrade to the new IDL
> version in order to avoid paying maintenance costs (which come out to about
> $10K per year for our Vax cluster).
>
> --Wayne Landsman landsman@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov
>
When I read the new policy, it said that you have to have current
software maintenance for each license. So if you are networked with a 7
session license it costs the same as a single node locked. If this is not the
case then the letter I received was poorly worded.
It will be interesting to find out what this is really going to cost
(Especially since we have a site license for PV-Wave here!).
--
Joseph M. Zawodny (KO4LW) NASA Langley Research Center
Internet: zawodny@arbd0.larc.nasa.gov MS-475, Hampton VA, 23681-0001
Packet: ko4lw@wb0tax.va.usa
|
|
|
|
comp.lang.idl-pvwave archive
Members
Search
Help
Login
Home
