Subject: Re: CCL:License Transfer

From: Rick Venable <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 20:54:34 -0500 (EST)

On Thu, 16 Mar 2000, Bruce A. Luxon wrote:
> I've just recently received a new SGI and want to transfer our FELIX
> license from the old slow machine to the new fast machine. MSI just
> quoted me $500 just to transfer the license - a seemingly trivial
> task. This seems outrageous to me.  Is this typical? As an academic
> user I am having increasing difficulty supporting the use of
> commercial software at these prices. Any comments or advice? 

It certainly seems to be typical of MSI, anyway; they seem to epitomize
collecting money for doing next to nothing.  Other companies are much
more reasonable about license transfers (no charge), or offer floating
licenses so that you can install on multiple machines (but only run on
one).  You'd think a software company would have a better understanding
of redundancy, but such concepts rarely make it from the back rooms to
the Marketing Dept.

At NIH and elsewhere, a package called NMRpipe is being used for many
NMR data processing tasks, especially multidimensional techniques.  It's
freely available for Unix (or Linux).  It uses the Unix pipe concept to
pass data from one program module to another, the data formats are
documented, and user interaction is often through dialog boxes produced
via Tcl/Tk.  It makes the overall system highly flexible, not overly to
learn, and user extendable.

Contact the author, Frank Delaglio, at [email-masked] for more
details, and information on how to obtain the program.

A company has acquired the MS Windows rights to the code, so the version
for e.g. NT cost some money. 

--
Rick Venable                  =====\     |=|    "Eschew Obfuscation"
FDA/CBER Biophysics Lab       |____/     |=|
Bethesda, MD  U.S.A.          |   \    / |=|  ( Not an official statement or
[email-masked]          |    \  /  |=|    position of the FDA; for that,
http://www.erols.com/rvenable       \/   |=|    see   http://www.fda.gov  )