OCLC announced in April 2013 the changes in their license model for North America. EZProxy's license moves from requiring a one-time purchase of US$495 to a *annual* fee of $495, or through their hosted service, with the fee depending on scale of service. The old one-time purchase license is no longer offered for sale as of July 1, 2013. I don't have any details about pricing for other parts of the world.
An important thing to recognize here, is that they cannot legally change the terms of a license that is already in effect. The software you have purchased under the old license is still yours to use, indefinitely. OCLC has even released several maintenance updates during 2013 that are available to current license-holders. In fact, they released V5.7 in early January 2014, and made that available to all license-holders. However, all updates after that version are only available to holders of the yearly subscription. The hosted product is updated to the most current version automatically. My recommendation is: If your installation of EZProxy works, don't change it. Yet. Upgrade your installation to the last version available under the old license, and use that for as long as you can. At this point, there are no world-changing new features that have been added to the product. There is speculation that IPv6 support will be the next big feature-add, but I haven't heard anything official. Start planning and budgeting for a change, either to the yearly fee, or the cost of hosted, or to some as-yet-undetermined alternative. But I see no need to start paying now for updates you don't need. -Andy Andy Ingraham Dwyer Infrastructure Specialist State Library of Ohio 274 E. 1st Avenue Columbus, OH 43201 library.ohio.gov -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of stuart yeates Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2014 10:03 PM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] EZProxy changes / alternatives ? I probably should have been more specific. Does anyone have experience switching from EzProxy to anything else? Is anyone else aware of the coming OCLC changes and considering switching? Does anyone have a worked example like: "My EzProxy config for site Y looked like A; after the switch, my X config for site Z looked like B"? I'm aware of this good article: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/7470 cheers stuart On 29/01/14 15:24, stuart yeates wrote: > We've just received notification of forth-coming changes to EZProxy, > which will require us to pay an arm and a leg for future versions to > install locally and/or host with OCLC AU with a ~ 10,000km round trip. > > What are the alternatives? > > cheers > stuart -- Stuart Yeates Library Technology Services http://www.victoria.ac.nz/library/
