Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] · Wed, 17 Apr 2002 10:52:41 -0500 (CDT)

re...,

> I'd like to know how different sites handle the Vxworks target license
> issue.
> 
> I recently got a quote from WindRiver  It shows two price structures.  
> 
> Plan A is to buy target license one by one (or mutiple at a time), and
> later orders are independent of your previous orders.  There is no need
> to sign anything.
> 
> Plan B is cheaper, and we could lock the price for the later purcases
> for the life of our project. (for example, I pay 10 license now for
> 4875, and all later license purchases will be $487.5/ea).  But the catch
> is that you'll need to sign a license agreement.  At BNL, it's the legal
> department's job (which means lots of paper work, and they'll have to
> approve the agreement).
> 
> ------------------
> Plan A:
> 
> Quantity     Base_price     Incremental Price/unit
> 
>  1-4          1200          1170
>  5-9          5880          1008
> 10-24        10920           792
> 25-49        22800           480
> 50-99        34800           312
> ----------------------------------------
> 
> Plan B: (requiring to sign a target license agreement)
> 
> Volume_band   Quantity      per_unit_price     PO_minimum
>    
>    1           1            975                 975
>    2           10           487                4875
>    3           100          225               22500
> ....
> 
> ----------------------------------------
> 
> 
> Obviously, if we could adopt Plan B it will be much cheaper (and easier)
> for other beamlines to follow us to move to EPICS (at $487/ea compared
> to
> 1200/ea, for example). 
> 
> I am just wondering how the target license issue is handled in various
> EPICS sites.  Particularly in sites where large number of target
> licenses is required (e.g.,  APS)

What sort of license agreement do they want for plan B?  We bought a
bunch of target licenses for distribution to APS-affiliated groups.
I think the figure was $400 ea. and we agreed not to bother WRS with
distribution of individual licenses, and to provide technical support
to the license holders.  Separately, we bought what amounts to single-
seat developers licenses for distribution to projects within APS.  The
whole thing was a mess, and I never heard the same story twice from WRS. but
I did learn one thing: if you talk to a WRS engineer, everything is
possible. If you have to talk to a WRS lawyer, it's best to stab
yourself in the neck first.

We had a fair amount of history with WRS at the time this happened, and
things were even more up in the air then.  (We bought a bunch of
licenses from Kinetic Systems, back when they were reselling them.)
Back then, we were told target licenses had to be associated with a
developer's license.  I don't think that's true anymore.

Tim Mooney ([email protected]) (630)252-5417
Beamline Controls & Data Acquisition Group
Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Lab.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System