Re: GEAC lawsuit

By JAIKUMAR VIJAYAN 
(June 26, 2000) Asix-year legal dispute over mainframe software maintenance 
issues has ended with a jury verdict affirming the right of third parties to 
service another vendor's legacy software. 

The decision will potentially make it easier for companies to discontinue 
costly vendor maintenance and seek cheaper third parties to service their 
aging mainframe software, several users said last week. 

But those firms first need to check their existing contracts to ensure that 
they're not legally bound to vendor maintenance services, the users 
cautioned. 

In a unanimous early-June verdict, a federal court jury in Newark, N.J., said 
Grace Consulting Inc. in Parsipanny, N.J., didn't violate copyright laws in 
providing add-on software and maintenance services for customers of Geac 
Computer Corp. in Toronto. 

Dun & Bradstreet Software - which became part of Geac when it was acquired in 
1996 - initiated the suit against Grace Consulting in 1995. Dun & Bradstreet 
claimed that Grace violated its copyright by modifying its mainframe 
accounting and payroll software for customers while providing third-party 
maintenance. 

Grace claimed that any tweaks it had performed were to make Geac's 
applications more interoperable with other software at customer locations. 

Grace - which offers maintenance services at half Geac's rates - claimed that 
Geac was illegally using its copyright to prevent customers from hiring 
less-expensive third parties to maintain its software. 

Consumer Support 

Grace's victory means more third parties will be encouraged to offer similar 
services, said Forrest Eudaily, an associate director at Whitehall-Robins 
Healthcare, a $1.7 billion maker of over-the-counter drugs in Madison, N.J. 

"I think it's great. . . . It opens up the market to better competition and 
better rates," said Joe Quinn, manager of financial and administrative 
systems at Connecticut Natural Gas Co. in Hartford. 

The firm almost signed up with Grace in 1995 because its service was 55% 
cheaper than what Geac was offering but decided against it because of the 
lawsuit, he said. 

But users need to make sure they're not violating copyrights when making 
changes to source code under third-party arrangements, warned Eudaily. 

Maintaining aging software means having to make occasional changes to the 
source code, sometimes for regulatory reasons and sometimes to make the 
software more interoperable with new packaged applications, Eudaily said. 

But unless users negotiate the right to make such changes up front, a vendor 
could prevent them from signing up third-party service providers at a later 
stage, said Wynn Pope, a director of Chicago-based Share Inc., a large-system 
user group. 

"The best advice would be to simply talk to your vendor" before considering 
outside service, Pope said. 
 
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