Re: LISTSERV-Lite (was Best Mailing List Software For A Host Startup)

[Eric Thomas <ERIC @ VM . SE . LSOFT . COM>]

>LISTSERV-Lite is a  commercial application aimed at  management of lists
>of no more than a few hundred users.

Let's say no more than a few thousand. The free edition is indeed limited
to 500 subscribers  per list, but that's another story.  The Lite version
should  perform  *roughly*  like  ListProc 6.0  and  other  compiled  MLM
freebies with large lists.

>However, there are severe restrictions on  this. You may not manage more
>than 10 lists.

If you have  multiple machines (which is the case  at most universities),
you can install multiple copies of the code and run 10 lists on each.

>You  may not  be a  membership organization  that offers  messages as  a
>benefit of membership. You may not  convert your newsletter to a mailing
>list. Obviously,  the latter  restrictions will simply  be on  the honor
>system.

I am  not too worried about  that. If the  local golf club uses  the free
edition to  distribute a newsletter  to its members  and once a  year the
newsletter says "Remember to renew your subscription!", officially L-Soft
will be upset, but I doubt any of  the people who work at L-Soft will get
red  in the  face and  start calling  lawyers. On  the other  hand, if  a
company uses the  free edition to distribute a  financial newsletter that
costs $500/year, they will get a call from our legal VP and I don't think
it will take long  for them to send us a check  with a letter apologizing
for this "very unfortunate incident".  Basically, the idea is that people
who don't  have money  to buy the  software should get  it for  free, and
people who have  money but would rather  not have to pay  should join the
club, connect their feet  to the ground and pay for  the product like all
our other customers. You can't implement this policy in a waterproof way,
so you have to approximate and  sometimes jump through hoops. This is why
the policy on the web site seems weird sometimes. To be able to say X you
sometimes have to say Y even if you don't really care about Y.

>Mr. Thomas has said that support for the "free" version of LISTSERV-Lite
>will be next to nonexistant. However,  when I was having trouble with an
>evaluation copy, he personally sent me a response!

What this means is that we don't want free edition people to call and ask
how much  data you can store  in 1M :-)  Actually, we don't want  them to
call,  period,  and we  want  them  to  understand  that we  have  paying
customers to help  before we can look at their  trouble reports. This may
surprise you,  but the less people  pay, the more demanding  they are. In
the  academic world  there  is a  tradition  to give  people  a break  if
something is free, but evidently nobody informed corporate sites about it
:-) Or  maybe it's  the result  of having  IIS "freely"  available, where
"free" means that the license for NT  Server was increased by $100 at the
same time as  IIS was released. This makes people  feel (probably rightly
so) that they are actually paying for the "free" software in question.

>LISTSERV-Lite has  been ported to  some, but not all  operating systems.
>There are versions for  VMS, 2 for NT, but only a  handful of Unices. In
>contrast, LISTSERV has been ported to 13 flavors of Unix!

This is just a practical problem, the code does work on all the 13 unixes
in question.  It's just a  lot of  work to build  and test for  all these
systems when  you know the code  will change soon and  packaging problems
will probably be found. The Lite version will support all the systems for
which the Classic version is available, except for VM. We may be dropping
a disused  unix brand  or two  by the way,  but this  is not  a technical
issue. When you can't buy the system in question any longer and your last
customer migrates to another brand, well, you have to ask yourself if you
really want  to keep maintaining that  system in the hope  that you might
find another customer before the  system disappears completely. Is anyone
on the list using Interactive Unix  for instance? :-) There's a very good
chance that we'll adopt a "compile on demand" approach for such systems.

  Eric