licensing policies

[joho@dutirt2.tudelft.nl (/2000)]

Hi,

As an Ada user who is rather disappointed in my compiler manufacturer,
I would like your opinion on the following:

We have been using a VADS Ada compiler for Sun-3 for several years now
(educational licence). During these years, we had a maintenance contract,
which resulted in a compiler upgrade about once a year. A couple of weeks
ago, we replaced ALL our Sun-3 machines by Sun-4's. The maintenance
contract made us think that we would receive a `free' copy of the compiler
for the Sun-4. Wrong. We have to pay for it, although we get an extra
discount (apart from the standard edu. discount) of 25%. Apart from the
question whether the university can afford to pay for the new compiler,
there is the fundamental question whether such upgrades should be part
of the standard mainenance. In my opinion, there is really no change in
architecture: we have comparable hardware (single user workstations, it
would be different if we wanted to move our licence to a mainframe).

What is the opinion of the rest of the world? Please post or reply by
e-mail.

Job Honig,
Delft University of Technology
Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science
joho@dutiaa.tudelft.nl