On Wed, 30 Oct 1996 17:03:29 -0500 (EST) Michelle Murrain
<mpmNS@hamp.hampshire.edu> said:
>(I heard about "listserv lite" which is a freeware version of listserv?)
"LISTSERV Lite" is a new product that will be released soon (we just want
to release LISTSERV 1.8c first - I'm writing the release notes now). It
is basically a subset of LISTSERV, which will be renamed to "LISTSERV
Classic" when the new product is launched. LISTSERV Lite is much cheaper
and is targeted at sites which have gotten connected recently and really
have no idea what this mailing list stuff is, since the press doesn't
talk about it much it can't be very useful, but you never know. The least
you could say is that they wouldn't know what to do with LISTSERV's full
functionality; they're the kind of customers who call to ask how much
data you can store in 1M of disk space (literally) :-) Similarly, there
are thousands of smaller organizations that just don't need the full
functionality of LISTSERV and are reluctant to pay for it.
"LISTSERV Lite Free Edition" is a free version of LISTSERV Lite that is
limited to 10 lists of up to 500 subscribers each. It may not be used for
commercial purposes or resold/bundled in commercial applications, but
otherwise it doesn't cost anything and the license won't expire. To run
more lists, you can install multiple copies on multiple machines. The
assumption is that this will give people a "soft" incentive to buy the
commercial version once they've got 4-5 machines to look after when 1
would be enough. Organizations that positively don't have a buck (and in
particular universities in third world countries) can just keep
installing more copies and we won't mind. What would upset us though is
if someone used the Free Edition to make money, either directly or more
cleverly. Especially spammers (it's one of the reasons we have a 500
subscriber restriction). It took a long, long fight with marketing to
make the Free Edition happen, and it was all centered on whether we could
prevent commercial usage (and *ensure* no usage by spammers). I can't say
that *all* our marketing folks are fully convinced, but personally I
don't doubt that such abuse will be self-policing, ie if someone tries to
use the Free Edition to make a quick buck, the users will get so upset
that the perpetrator will think twice about trying it again :-) The Free
Edition adds a blurb to welcome messages (NOT to list postings) to say
that it is a free copy not to be used for commercial purposes, and the
logo used on the web archive interface also says "Free Edition" in red
letters and links to the usage policy. Hopefully this should be enough to
make users aware that this is not paid for and they should refuse to pay
for any service provided through this license, and engage the flame
thrower instead :-)
Currently you can download a preview of the Free Edition from our web
site, although it's well hidden. The idea was to get a trickle of users
and see if there are any problems. The code is the same, in fact you can
upgrade to the commercial version or to LISTSERV Classic just by swapping
license keys, but the packaging is different, so we wanted to be careful.
The only complaints were that people had to download the manuals
separately, which is because it is a pain in the butt to make a decent
ASCII version from a text processor, so we will only do this once when
"closing" 1.8c. For now, this comes with the 1.8b manuals, which indeed
are outdated. Anyway, the URL is:
http://www.lsoft.com/listserv-lite.html
This has info about the differences between Lite and Classic, and links
to the preview download area. Not all unixes are included in the preview,
and neither is Win95, but this will all be added when the product is
released. The manuals are on FTP.LSOFT.COM, cd LISTSERV/Beta-1.8c.
Eric
|
|
