Forever Eating Our Own Tail
Wiseman posted an excerpt from a comp.lang.lisp thread about Franz and their pricing model. You might be able to get to it, but right now his site is timing out for me. In the comments for that post, Ash wrote:
Ash, please.
"You guys are assholes for setting a pricing and licensing policy I don't like! And you have the gall to enforce it!" C'mon. They haven't hassled your family, called you names, or shown up at your door with and scalded you in the face with piping hot coffee in a cup clearly labeled "WARNING: THE CONTENTS OF THIS CUP ARE EXTREMELY HOT".
You know, usually, when I find something too expensive or a license too restrictive for my tastes, I don't buy it. It's a pretty neat solution. Sure, It doesn't work everywhere, such as with mob influence and in nations without a vaguely capitalist marketplace (black market or otherwise), but where it does work, it works pretty well.
The other cool thing about the power to not buy things is that sometimes you can, should you be so moved, talk to the person who makes the expensive thing and say "this is way too expensive", and maybe they'll make it cheaper. I've given this a snazzy name I call "negotiation". But maybe they don't, and then hey, you can still not buy it. Win-win!
Anyway, I don't think Lisp's "reputation" is hurt by Franz. It turns out other people -- shock! awe! -- sell Lisp too, like Lispworks, and they have -- zounds! -- different pricing and licensing terms. Some people buy their product because they prefer the price and/or the licensing terms.
My bias: I bought a Franz license, but I had a similar issue; I couldn't afford their licenses. So I cornered a guy from Franz at a trade show and told him why I wanted to use his product but couldn't. Small companies that have niche products are usually dying to know this sort of thing, since they can't really afford to ignore or ostracize people who would be fans and users of their product if they'd only let them be. We continued talking over email and we worked out a deal that was okay for the both of us which involved licensing terms I liked and some money and some of my time for them.
In short, I don't think the people at Franz are assholes because of their pricing or licensing decisions, or their willingness to back them up, and my personal experience working with them has been entirely positive. I think you're more likely to damage the "reputation" of Lisp by claiming that Lisp vendors are assholes because they created a pricing and licensing policy they were comfortable with, someone once broke that agreement, and they followed the law.
It's idle speculation, but would you be as outraged against, say, the developers of CLISP, if they used legal remediation to try to stop someone who was illegally using CLISP and not adhering to the GPL? Somehow I doubt it.
Wow, what a bunch of assholes.I wated to reply by posting a comment of my own, but time out problems prevented that, so here's the reply"
I love that 'shipping ACL with its product' is what they call compiling binaries. Which nearly every development environment on the planet lets you do for free.
I'm sure this sort of insanity really helps lisp's reputation!
Ash, please.
"You guys are assholes for setting a pricing and licensing policy I don't like! And you have the gall to enforce it!" C'mon. They haven't hassled your family, called you names, or shown up at your door with and scalded you in the face with piping hot coffee in a cup clearly labeled "WARNING: THE CONTENTS OF THIS CUP ARE EXTREMELY HOT".
You know, usually, when I find something too expensive or a license too restrictive for my tastes, I don't buy it. It's a pretty neat solution. Sure, It doesn't work everywhere, such as with mob influence and in nations without a vaguely capitalist marketplace (black market or otherwise), but where it does work, it works pretty well.
The other cool thing about the power to not buy things is that sometimes you can, should you be so moved, talk to the person who makes the expensive thing and say "this is way too expensive", and maybe they'll make it cheaper. I've given this a snazzy name I call "negotiation". But maybe they don't, and then hey, you can still not buy it. Win-win!
Anyway, I don't think Lisp's "reputation" is hurt by Franz. It turns out other people -- shock! awe! -- sell Lisp too, like Lispworks, and they have -- zounds! -- different pricing and licensing terms. Some people buy their product because they prefer the price and/or the licensing terms.
My bias: I bought a Franz license, but I had a similar issue; I couldn't afford their licenses. So I cornered a guy from Franz at a trade show and told him why I wanted to use his product but couldn't. Small companies that have niche products are usually dying to know this sort of thing, since they can't really afford to ignore or ostracize people who would be fans and users of their product if they'd only let them be. We continued talking over email and we worked out a deal that was okay for the both of us which involved licensing terms I liked and some money and some of my time for them.
In short, I don't think the people at Franz are assholes because of their pricing or licensing decisions, or their willingness to back them up, and my personal experience working with them has been entirely positive. I think you're more likely to damage the "reputation" of Lisp by claiming that Lisp vendors are assholes because they created a pricing and licensing policy they were comfortable with, someone once broke that agreement, and they followed the law.
It's idle speculation, but would you be as outraged against, say, the developers of CLISP, if they used legal remediation to try to stop someone who was illegally using CLISP and not adhering to the GPL? Somehow I doubt it.
1 Comments:
Dan,
In the interests of fairness I think Ash was objecting to
" 'shipping ACL with its product' is what they call compiling binaries. Which nearly every development environment on the planet lets you do for free."
The Franz view of someone building a product with ACL seems to be that the product is a "value added" ACL ! (and thus worthy of a royalty in perpetuity) (see their use of the term "Value Added Reseller License" etc)
I understand the technical reasoning behind this, but if you strip ash's comments of provocative words like "assholes", he may have a point. From a purely competitive point of view, ACL is a very hard sell to those who control the purse strings.
Even technical folks blanch when their ideas rae labelled "value adds" to ACL.
Having said that, you are totally right to point out that Franz can sell their product on any terms they want.
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