[Info-vax] A new suggestion to handle the temporary production licences problem

[Simon Clubley]

While there is a lot of unease at the requirement to pay for a licence
on an ongoing annual basis, it seems the _real_ problem is that customers
could go bust (or at least be badly hurt) if the supply of VSI licences
suddenly stops.

As such I have another idea:

VSI doesn't issue the customer licences, HPE does (for a fee for each
licence, which allows HPE to make a small profit on each licence).
If HPE doesn't want this role, even though they will profit from it,
there should be other large companies able to take on this role.

The main problem is the worry that the company issuing the licences may
go bust and VSI is probably a lot smaller than most of the customers
still using VMS, so this concern is massively amplified.

With a company the size of HPE issuing the licences, this concern is
massively reduced because HPE is too large (hopefully!) to suddenly stop
operating overnight without any successor company.

Under a formal contract arrangement with VSI, HPE would be notified when
VSI had acquired a new customer and HPE would then be responsible for
collecting payment from the customer on an ongoing basis and for passing
it, minus HPE's fee, to VSI. HPE, not VSI, would issue licences to the
customer as required.

This HPE-VSI contract would state that this arrangement has a long notice
period (5-10 years) so, if either the successor to VSI or HPE themselves
wanted to cancel it, the arrangement could not just be terminated at short
notice.

You would still need guarantees within the contract to guard against the
500% annual increase problem, but this should be more acceptable to VSI
and their creditors than the escrow option might be.

No VMS specific knowledge would be required within HPE (other than the
ability to generate a VMS licence on demand) so this would be purely a
contract management and licence distribution arrangement no different
to the contracts that HPE currently manage for its own customers.

This means that if VSI goes bust, then customers would still get
their licences from HPE for a minimum of 5-10 years and there would
be no interruption in the supply of new licences to VSI's customers
regardless of what happens to VSI.

VSI's creditors would still see income from licences and so would
any successor organisation to VSI.

I would suggest the customer's annual licence payment is in two parts:
About 20% for the right to continue running their current VMS version
for the contract period without any support and about 80% for full
support from VSI or any successor company.

When there's a support organisation in place (either VSI or another
company) the customer is required to pay the full 100% via HPE each year.
If VSI fails and there is no replacement company, but only creditors,
the customer is only required to pay the 20% each year.

That way, the customer still gets their annual licence without having
to pay for the support services they are not receiving and the VSI
creditors still get something from the VSI customers on an ongoing basis.

Comments ? Suggested improvements ?

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.