A Letter to the YAZ Community

Those of you living in the United States have no doubt been
subject 
to fund drives for National Public Radio. For those of you
living in 
other countries, NPR is a not-for-profit radio broadcasting

corporation that relies on voluntary listener contributions
for over 
50% of its funding. Anyone can, of course, listen to any NPR
program 
without paying, but if a certain percentage of listeners did
not make 
voluntary contributions, the corporation would not be
sustainable. 
It's called listener supported radio.

I think you can see where I am headed with this.

Open Source software is free to download and use. You are
all within 
your rights to do just that. In fact, that's part of what
open source 
software is all about: the freedom to use the software as
you see 
fit, without needing to make any payments.

But that is not the full story, of course. Open Source is
also about 
giving back to the community that develops and supports the
software. 
Like NPR, Index Data would not be sustainable as an ongoing
company 
if a certain percentage of our community of users did not
give back 
to us in some form. Some of you do give back--in support
contracts, 
in code, and in other ways. For that, we are very grateful.
You are 
enabling us to continue to give you new and useful programs,
as well 
as to continually improve our existing programs.

Yet Index Data is not doing as much as we would like for our

community, because our ability to continue to develop our
Open Source 
distributions relies to a great extent on earnings from
commercial 
support contracts. One way you can help us serve you better
is to 
convince your institution to take out a commercial support
contract with us.

Commercial support for Index Data software begins at $500
per year. 
Now we both know that many of your institutions can afford
that. And 
every dollar that you put into a support contract will go
back to 
your institution, either as direct individual support, or in

continued development of our open source software.

I would be remiss if I did not also point out that with
Index Data 
commercial support, your institution will get its money's
worth. Let 
me quote from our standard support contract:
    * Guaranteed attendance to bug reports within five
working days.
    * Guaranteed patches/repairs for reproducible bugs
within ten 
working days. "Reproducible bugs" means situations
or conditions 
where the software does not behave as the documentation or
reasonable 
expectation suggests it should. Attendance to bugs in the
software is 
not counted as "problem resolutions."
Thanks for listening. Now do the right thing and email me
your 
request for a commercial support contract if you do not
already have 
one, or download the appropriate contract from 
www.indexdata.com/support and help us at Index Data to give
even 
better support to this community.

Regards,

David

David Dorman
US Marketing Manager, Index Data
52 Whitman Ave.
West Hartford, Connecticut  06107
dormanindexdata.com
860-389-1568 or toll free 866-489-1568
fax: 860-561-5613

INDEX DATA Means Business
for Open Source and Open Standards
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
www.indexdata.com

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A Letter to the YAZ Community

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