Summary of Denver Lisp UG March meeting
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Monday evening, we had our Denver Area Lisp User Group meeting for March. Jans Aasman and Jeff Kielty from Franz chatted with us about a range of different topics. Gordon Weakliem has already beaten me to the punch :-) and posted some comments about the meeting. But, better late than never! Here is a summary of some of the topics that were discussed:
- Franz ACL pricing: This started off with an email message
that Alex Peake had sent me regarding Franz's pricing of their
Allegro Common Lisp product. His contention was that Franz's
pricing was too high for entreneurial Lisp developers. This topic
has come up a number of times on c.l.l. as well. The retail
pricing of ACL is generally assumed to start at about $6,000 for a
commercial license (Franz's pricing is not available on their web site). The second largest Lisp vendor is
Xanalys LispWorks and their pricing starts at about
$1,000. The huge discrepancy between the Franz pricing and the
Xanalys pricing has been a sore point for a number of people so I
decided to put the question to Franz directly (telling them that I
would publish whatever they told me ;-)).
The standard Franz answer is that they are targeting a particular customer base with their product. Their pricing is fair for that target market and they can provide high quality support for those customers. However, they disagreed that they are not interested in the business of independent consultants or smaller entrepreneurs. They have made special "extended trial" arrangements with a number of individuals/organizations that couldn't afford the up-front costs of ACL before they had developed a product. In addition, they indicated that people who want to use ACL but are concerned about the price should talk to them to see what alternative options (leasing, academic pricing, alternative payment and quid pro quo arrangements ) might be appropriate.
A further criticism was made that Franz's pricing is too "opaque". If you go to the LispWorks web site, the pricing for LispWorks on different platforms is easily available. However, Franz's pricing is not available on their web site and people need to contact a Franz sales person in order to find out basic pricing information. Jeff & Jans agreed that they need to do a better job of making their pricing options and alternatives known.
- .Net Support: Jans said that they had a ton of books on
.Net and a developer who was researching how best to provide .Net
support and/or interoperability. However, as this stage, they do
not have a firm public direction on what type of .Net support they
will provide.
- CL Library Development: Jans said that Franz would like to help
kick-start the development of more CL libraries and
applications (both Open Source and commercial). Having more libary support will help bring more people
to Lisp and will improve sales of Franz's product, so this is a
win-win situation. Jans is interested in hearing from people as to
how Franz might support this effort. Some suggestions that were
made during the meeting included:
- Covering ACL license fees for libraries developed with ACL
- Contracting out the development of libraries with a proportion of proceeds from the sale of the libraries going to Franz and a proportion to the developer
- In addition to providing the Trial edition (with heap
limitation) of ACL, license a full version of ACL at low (or no) cost to
developers who will be creating Open Source products. If they
subsequently want to sell the product they develop, they must purchase a
commercial ACL license.
