From an ongoing dialogue with one of our suppliers:
> From: [Name deleted to protect the, uh, whatever.] > > Simon, > > My name is [Name deleted] and I am an account manager at Inetsoft. My > records show that > your maintenance expired on May 1, 2004. To get support at > this point, you > would renew maintenance as usual, but also would need to pay > a $100 penalty > for the breach in maintenance (This should have been indicated on the > original quote). As you were operating on the complementary 60-day > maintenance, a 1-year extended maintenance would be traced > back to the date > of purchase (Mar 2, 2004), giving a renewal date of Mar 1, 2005.
So, as I read this, in order to get serious defects in your product repaired, you want to charge me a year's fee for six month's support, plus a hundred dollar fine on top?
This doesn't sound too reasonable to me...
Cheers, Simon Brunning.
Update: They got back to me:
Please understand without these terms, many customers would decline initial maintenance, and come back to the sales department and purchase maintenance only when they run into a problem. This causes problems for our customers, as they need to produce the funds and process the order all the while development is on hold because of a bug or issue in the software that does not allow them to continue their efforts. Comparatively speaking, the penalty is a small amount and is primarily in place to discourage this activity.
Ah, so these terms are for our benefit! It all makes sense now!
iText it is, then.
Posted to Java by Simon Brunning at September 10, 2004 08:48 AMAh, yes. The ongoing quest to turn one-off sales into "revenue streams." The 60 day complimentary is a new one on me, though.
Just a thought, are you perhaps being a little optimistic in expecting a problem to get fixed? Surely another one of their customers would have already complained about some of the more egregious problems that you have had?
Posted by: Alan Green on September 10, 2004 03:21 PMI think your righg, Alan. I suspect that getting support would buy us nothing but the opportunity to *tell* them about the bugs. We'd probably get nothing more from them than "Yes that's a bug, we are aware of that".
Or, perhaps, we might get "Ah, that's fixed in version 6.0. An upgrade will cost you ...."
Posted by: Simon Brunning on September 10, 2004 03:26 PMHi Simon --
What are you using iText for? You may tend towards open-source libraries, but if you need to do any PDF text/metadata extraction in Java, you may find PDFTextStream interesting: http://snowtide.com/home/PDFTextStream/
Posted by: Chas Emerick on September 10, 2004 03:44 PMWe need to *generate* PDF, Chas, not consume it.
Still, PDFTextStream is an interesting package. I'll keep note of it in case I ever *do* need to consume PDF. Thanks.
Posted by: Simon Brunning on September 10, 2004 03:48 PM...so, apparently it's for your benefit so that as soon as you need help, they will help you, no waiting for a pesky week while they sort out the licences for you.
It's all so clear now!
I think the idea is that a support contract is insurance. You pay, and you may or may not have a problem. If you do, presumably it's cheaper than having to pay for the maintainance; if you don't have a problem you've obviously wasted your money.
Insurance providers usually don't like to cover you for things that happen when you don't have any coverage. Of course, producers should take responsibility for their defects, but that's another issue.
Posted by: Ian Bicking on September 10, 2004 05:53 PMSounds like the system I was working on last year... I wrastled the Crystal Reports aligator and won 19 out of 20 times, but for the last one ended up using iText instead. Let us know how it goes!
Posted by: Alan Green on September 10, 2004 11:39 PMThing is, we don't really need support as such - we just need software that works. It feels to me taht we are being asked to pay twice.
The fine was just the icing on the cake.
Posted by: Simon Brunning on September 13, 2004 10:33 AM