Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1999 23:28:32 +0000
Reply-To: John Whittington <medisci@POWERNET.COM>
Sender: "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From: John Whittington <medisci@POWERNET.COM>
Subject: Re: Licensing Costs Again; WAS: Yet more thoughts on SAS for Linux
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
At 16:06 10/03/99 -0700, Mark S Dehaan wrote:
>I don't think there is anyone out there who wouldn't prefer a reasonable
>"one-time" non-expiring purchase plan for SAS. But as I experienced in
>pursuing the perpetual Gov't Contract route, what is reasonable to SAS may
>not be reasonable to the user. In my analysis it seemed that SAS worked it
>out so that you would end up paying the about the same no matter which way
>you went if you considered obsolescence of an OS. We thought of paying once
>for a perpetual license with the idea of not upgrading for 10 or more years
>(which would be one $ saving approach), but what OS is gonna be around and
>suitable 10 yrs from now?
Suitable for what? If you felt able to say that today's release of SAS
would still be adequate for you in 10 years' time, then why not also the OS?
MS-DOS 2.x will, as far as I know, run on a Pentium III (or the mainframe
equivalent situation)!!
In any event, my point was that most people, certainly serious commercial
customers are *not* going to think that there present version of SAS will
still be 'satisfactory' for them in 10 years' time; they are far more
likely to want to upgrade (or even change OS!) in 2-3 years, I reckon - so
it would be reasonable for SI to set the financial 'break-even' point for a
perpetual licence fee around that sort of duration.
>Perhaps if SAS goes public as rumored it will also get a more user friendly
>pricing paradigm?
Only if someone is sensible enough to see that as a means of expanding the
market, leading to greater profits in the medium/long-term. If the
shareholders demand immediate profits, I could well see the changes going in
the opposite direction!
Regards
John
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