Re: Ridiculous software transfer fees (was EDI and Inovis fromLibraryData)

What does Congress & DOJ have to do with it?

Somebody should point them to this message thread. Send a message to
their President and let them know they're killing the iSeries with
their outrageous pricing model.

I had a manager a couple of years ago who was not a "fan" of the
400/iSeries. He was always complaining about the high maintenance
costs of software and hardware. And, I couldn't really argue with him
about it. Because, every time we turned around, we were dealing with
vendors who had outrageous prices for their maintenance.

We went thru a similar situation with our primary vendor when we
converted from a 620 to a 520. However, the difference was, we had
dropped support, and they wanted over $100K to re-license and convert.
We worked out a deal with them where we would agree to half that
amount, plus we would but their new financials package and agree to a
2 year maint contract. Then we had similar issues with
Sterling/Gentran.

I understand that a vendor needs to make money, and I'm not opposed to
them doing so. What bothers me is vendors like those mentioned here,
who have this old mentality and pricing structure that does nothing
but hurt and even push customers away and ultimately destroy the
iSeries. IBM needs to get involved with these vendors and help them to
understand that they need to change their old ways of doing business
if they want this platform to be around for another 25 years.
Otherwise, Unix/Linux, and even Windows will only continue to eat away
at what's left.