Subject: Re: Harlequin vs. Allegro From: Erik Naggum <clerik@naggum.no> Date: 1998/06/18 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3107147623764178@naggum.no> * Zeno the Anonymous Poster | There is a huge market of people such as myself who run 1-5 person | programming/consulting shops and cater to businesses with 5-100 | employees. Contrary to the opinions of the larger software vendors, | Franz must have decided that there is no market for programming languages | there, at least not for their version of Lisp, because the pricing and | royalties put their product out of our reach. I'm in that market. I don't have a problem with Franz Inc's pricing. I have several friends in similar positions as myself whose employers or project leaders appear to have little qualms about paying for a full license, either. I'm somewhat dismayed to hear that we don't exist and that we constitute "no market", but I think this must go to show that your imagination is somewhat restricted to your own immediate conditions and that you appear to think that what you cannot imagine also cannot exist. this is the same mental illness that afflicts Microsoft victims, who think their sorry condition extends to the whole of the universe. the very fortunate fact is that it doesn't. if, on the other hand, your supposed "huge market" can present itself to Franz Inc and be profitable for them, don't think for a minute that they wouldn't cater to it. much to my dismay, they have already decided to cater to Microsoft victims with a 40% discount on the Professional Edition and a 25% discount on the Enterprise Edition, which I personally think is a disgrace -- I don't want to have to argue against using Microsoft's demented crudware and suffering their criminal conduct based on the price difference of the development system, and beancounters can be trusted to bring this issue up. an Intel box can, however, run Linux and get away with a support license slightly more espensive than a Professional Edition license, but it still isn't great to see that people get rewarded by a company that should reward smart choices for making the really stupid choice that going for Microsoft is in the long run. my current client uses Franz Inc's ACL 5.0 for Linux offering and has purchased a service contract, and more licenses may come as this spreads to more systems. the service contract for Linux is a little cheaper in the short run, but not in the longer run since it costs the same every year instead of just a maintenance fee, so the goal is to get onto a fully supported license once Franz Inc (hopefully) decides that Linux is worth supporting fully. in any case, the cost of the license accounts for less than 5% of the budgeted project costs over its (minimum) 4-year life-time, and less than 10% of the development costs the first year. this seems to be fairly constant in my projects. I don't find Franz Inc's pricing to put _anything_ out of reach, neither for me nor for my clients -- on the contrary, Franz Inc's offerings have put some very interesting work _within_ reach for me and some fairly complex systems within reach of relatively small budgets for my clients. would this have happened regardless of their pricing and ability to make money and stay healthily in business? I don't think so, and that's why I'm worrying about their subsidizing Microsoft users, too. knowing what tremendous costs Microsoft puts over on software developers for their cruddy "operating systems", I have a hard time understanding the prudence of rewarding that market with huge discounts. I'm sure those who have yet to understand what Microsoft does to the software industry appreciate the lower entrance costs, however. #:Erik -- http://www.naggum.no/spam.html is about my spam protection scheme and how to guarantee that you reach me. in brief: if you reply to a news article of mine, be sure to include an In-Reply-To or References header with the message-ID of that message in it. otherwise, you need to read that page.