From chemistry-request _-at-_)server.ccl.net Thu Mar 16 21:06:09 2000 Received: from deimos.cber.nih.gov (deimos.cber.nih.gov [128.231.52.2]) by server.ccl.net (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id VAA07827 for ; Thu, 16 Mar 2000 21:06:09 -0500 Received: from localhost by deimos.cber.nih.gov with SMTP (1.37.109.14/16.2) id AA054268074; Thu, 16 Mar 2000 20:54:34 -0500 Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2000 20:54:34 -0500 (EST) From: Rick Venable To: "Bruce A. Luxon" Cc: CHEMISTRY |-at-| ccl.net Subject: Re: CCL:License Transfer In-Reply-To: <38D0F4B5.4B55F1BA:~at~:nmr.utmb.edu> Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII 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 delaglio $#at#$ helix.nih.gov 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 Rick_Venable -8 at 8- nih.gov | \ / |=| position of the FDA; for that, http://www.erols.com/rvenable \/ |=| see http://www.fda.gov )