Fw: [Sussex] What the opposition costs

[Iain Stevenson]

.. and we haven't even started to discuss whether we, as taxpayers, like to 
see local and central government signing up to this M$ moneymaking scam 
(oops, sorry, advantageous licencing programme).

I would agree with the comments made about managers (in my case I know more 
about telecom managers) preferring fixed recurring costs in budgets.  But 
it's a bit of a sad indictment of our businesses that they're prepared to 
pay something for nothing.

  Iain



--On Wednesday, March 10, 2004 5:37 pm +0000 Geoff Teale 
<gteale at cmedltd.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 16:33 +0000, Mark Harrison wrote:
>
>> Not true.
>>
>> I sell at least two products with this characteristic... neither of
>> these is a monopoly.
>
>
> Fair enough.  I am surprised that companies are prepared to take such a
> deal.  I see many companies selling a general support and maintenance
> contract for their software which would include far more than service
> and support than the Microsoft license applies as well as point releases
> and general patches - but very few software houses could dictate a flat
> fee like this.  I know we couldn't do this, and nor could Thomson (a
> much, much larger company than this) and I was never really interested
> enough to find out how Claybrook sold things - although I'm not sure
> they did sell anything the year I was there.
>
> One things for sure - you are certain to get a lot more service for your
> money from the likes of Red Hat _and_ the upgrades you need  - and if
> you choose not to you don't have to scrap the technology you can simply
> get another party to maintain it for you or do it yourself.
>
> It's notable that even IBM's support and maintenance contracts are
> significantly cheaper than Microsoft's *ouch* - and the level of support
> and service they seem to be offering (from first hand experience) is in
> a different league to anything I've experienced from Microsoft.
>
> --
> Geoff Teale
> Cmed Technology     /   Free Software Foundation
> gteale at cmedltd.com  /   tealeg at member.fsf.org
>
> Please avoid sending me Word, Excel or PowerPoint attachments.
> See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
>
>
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