Hi John,

I think you have a crucial point. I do not know about Oracle, but Clintrial 3.x (on VAX/VMS) and 4.x (on Windows) also keep running without paying an annual maintenance fee. The price for that one for Clintrial was 20% per year of the purchasing price, i.e. additional to it, thus after 5 years the total price has been paid twice! Maintenance involved free updates and unlimited telephone or email support. But one could decide to stop paying the maintenance fee and (legally) continue running what one already had running. And the purchasing prices depend(ed) on the modules selected and the number of them to use.

But since 2002 the purchasing prices and maintenance fees have been changed into annual license fees for new contracts which are obligatory if one want to keep using the software. The license fee is 50% of the original purchasing price per year, so in 4 years one already would have paid for the software twice. I don't know whether the software currently would stop if not paying the licenses, but it now (with new contracts of course) would be illegal to do so if at all possible.

I also would like some more variation in the contracts possible, e.g. choosing between buying or licensing (leasing) (for e.g. 10 to 25% of the purchasing price), various quantities of update policies (free updates, new versions), various quantities of helpdesk support, training, etc. However, I would expect it to be rather expensive all the way. The only cheap new software developments are the ones just started, still incomplete and unreliable; once these reach the quantitative and qualitative level of the renown software, they also are assigned their financial value [:-(. In relation to that I would welcome an official (cheap or free) policy for home copies (next to installations at work) for professional work (working with either one). And I do appreciate the LE version, though I would like to use it legally in preparation for professional work.

I think a rather good example of a very good software package for a very reasonable (purchasing) price is DBMS/copy (with its additional statistical features, DBMS/analyst) before it was taken over by SAS. Now is has been partially stripped for still the same or comparable price (as far as I know). One could remain using the package both legally and reliable for many decades provided supported hardware and OS. Conceptually it would be more than sufficient for many applications.

Regards - Jim. -- Y. (Jim) Groeneveld, MSc IMRO TRAMARKO tel. +31 412 407 070 senior statist./data man. P.O. Box 1 fax. +31 412 407 080 J.Groeneveld@ITGroups.com 5350 AA BERGHEM, NL www.imrotramarko.com

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