Re: Upgrade fee for cisam from IRIX 405 to IRIX 5.2

> We were compelled to upgrade our operating system to IRIX 5.2 to free > ourselves of bugs. We are still able to run CISAM 4.10 using the irix4 > libraries but would like not to. We have been paying software maintenance > on the product and did not expect a bill for the upgrade to CISAM 5. We are > considering recoding to use ndbm and fcntl record locking instead. > > How can a product that we have paid maintenance on attract an upgrade fee? > I might add for the duration of CISAM 4.1 usage (2 years) we have had no > need to report any faults or got any fixes. > -- > Ray Martin Unix Administrator/Analyst Ray, I'm not sure why you would be surprised. This is no different from buying maintenance on a video recorder or washing machine. If nothing goes wrong its wasted money but if you need it the supplier is using that money to maintain spare parts (bug fix releases) and a support network (hotline, technical support engineers) so that your equipment (software) can be fixed. When it comes time to replace your washing machine with a new model with lots of new facilities you don't get the new one for free. You buy it and hopefully get a discount by trading in the previous model (upgrade prices are lower than buying new). It is also not Informix's fault that you consider it necessary to upgrade rather than continue to use the working version you have. This can really be seen as part of the cost of upgrading your OS as you need to buy software that is available for that OS. This would normally have happened with some of your other suppliers as well. But it sounds as if you have been lucky and it is only Informix who have decided that there is not enough new sales potential to justify the cost of porting thier old software version to the new OS. Now you may disagree with how much they want to charge but that's an entirely different matter :-) Cheers - Jim My opinions are my own. They may vary with time but they remain MINE! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Name: Jim Gordon Internet: jgordon@ssf-sys.DHL.COM Company: DHL Systems Inc Phone: (415) 375-5222 Address: 700 Airport Blvd. #300 Fax: (415) 375-5019 Burlingame, CA 94010-1937 ----------------------------------------------------------------------