New 6.0 user charge policy?

I received notice today from one of my employees that Informix was going to be changing the way they do licensing. We pay for support from Informix year to year to keep up to date with the current releases of the software. At one point in the past we didn't buy the maintenance agreement and were forced to fork over $20,000 for the software when we wanted to do an upgrade. Now that we've paid for our maintenance, I asked one of my IS guys to upgrade the Informix version to the current version. We were told 2 things: 1) Informix is not shipping any software before the new year unless it is "revenue generating". THIS IS NOT APPROPRIATE. First, I already paid - so I DID GENERATE REVENUE. Second, since I did pay I should get product BEFORE new customers. 2) Informix is changing the way the issue licenses. At this point I pay for a certain class of machine 80486/66DX2. Running SCO Unix. Now they want to charge by the number of SQLTURBO processes that can run on the machine. I like the idea of charging PER USER but they aren't taking into account that I can run 3 windows on my pc, therefore running 3 SQLTURBO processes. I'm still running the software on 1 PC - 1 Server... Surely there should be a way to charge PER USER rather than PER PROCESS.... Now I have to re-evaluate my database solutions again and look at porting things - eventually - over to a "database neutral" environment where I can switch from Informix to Oracle and vice versa. While I agree this is a good idea, I don't like INFORMIX forcing me to do it. Could someone from Informix please comment on why the change in policy? -- (616)363-6680/14.4k 6128-28.8k|Daniel Wynalda SYSOP|Consultants Connection danielw@wybbs.mi.org N8KUD| 2783 Sandalwood Ct NE | Grand Rapids, MI 49505