It's worse than that.
The price we were quoted for hosting seems to have been picked so it can
be offered with a 90% discount when bundled with a package deal with
other OCLC products; buying into the on-going balkanization of the industry.
cheers
stuart
On 01/02/14 16:24, Roy Tennant wrote:
When it comes to hedging bets, I'd sure rather hedge my $50,000 bet than my
$500 one. Just sayin'.
Roy
On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 6:04 PM, BWS Johnson <[email protected]>wrote:
Salvete!
Tisn't necessarily Socialist to hedge one's bets. Look at what Wall
St. experts advise when one is unsure of whether to hold or sell. Monopoly
is only ever in the interest of those that hold it.
Short term the aquarium is enticing, but do you enjoy your
collapsed dorsal fin?
Cheers,
Brooke
------------------------------
On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 6:10 PM EST Salazar, Christina wrote:
I think though that razor thin budgets aside, the EZProxy using community
is vulnerable to what amounts to a monopoly. Don't get any ideas, OCLC
peeps (just kiddin') but now we're so captive to EZProxy, what are our
options if OCLC wants to gradually (or not so gradually) jack up the price?
Does being this captive to a single product justify community developer
time?
I think so but I'm probably just a damn socialist.
On Jan 31, 2014, at 1:36 PM, "Tim McGeary" <[email protected]> wrote:
Even with razor thin budgets, this is a no brainer. May they need
decide
between buying 10 new books or license EZProxy? Possibly, but if they
have
a need for EZProxy, that's still a no brainer - until a solid OSS
replacement that includes as robust a developer /support community comes
around. But again, at $500/year, I don't see a lot of incentive to
invest
in such a project.
On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 3:55 PM, Riley Childs <[email protected]
wrote:
But there are places on a razor thin budget, and things like this throw
them off ball acne
Sent from my iPhone
On Jan 31, 2014, at 3:32 PM, "Tim McGeary" <[email protected]>
wrote:
So what's the price point that EZProxy needs to climb to make it more
realistic to put resources into an alternative. At $500/year, I don't
even
have to think about justifying it. At 1% (or less) of the cost of
position
with little to no prior experience needed, it doesn't make a lot of
sense
to invest in an open source alternative, even on a campus that heavily
uses
Shibboleth.
Tim
On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 1:36 PM, Ross Singer <[email protected]>
wrote:
Not only that, but it's also expressly designed for the purpose of
reverse
proxying subscription databases in a library environment. There are
tons
of things vendors do that would be incredibly frustrating to get
working
properly in Squid, nginx, or Apache that have already been solved by
EZProxy. Which is self-fulfilling: vendors then cater to what EZProxy
does
(rather than improving access to their resources).
Art Rhyno used to say that the major thing that was inhibiting the
widespread adoption of Shibboleth was how simple and cheap EZProxy was.
I
think there is a lot of truth to that.
-Ross.
On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 1:23 PM, Kyle Banerjee <
[email protected]
wrote:
EZproxy is a self-installing statically compiled single binary
download,
with a built-in administrative interface that makes most common
administrative tasks point-and-click, that works on Linux and Windows
systems, and requires very little in the way of resources to run. It
also
has a library of a few hundred vendor stanzas that can be copied and
pasted
and work the majority of the time.
To successfully replace EZproxy in this setting, it would need to be
packaged in such a way that it is equally easy to install and
maintain,
and
the library of vendor stanzas would need to be developed as apache
conf.d
files.
This. The real gain with EZProxy is that configuring it is crazy easy.
You
just drop it in and run it -- it's feasible for someone with no
experience
in proxying or systems administration to get it operational in a few
minutes. That is why I think virtualizing a system that makes
accessing
the
more powerful features of EZProxy easy is a good alternative.
kyle
--
Tim McGeary
[email protected]
GTalk/Yahoo/Skype/Twitter: timmcgeary
484-294-7660 (cell)
--
Tim McGeary
[email protected]
GTalk/Yahoo/Skype/Twitter: timmcgeary
484-294-7660 (cell)
--
Stuart Yeates
Library Technology Services http://www.victoria.ac.nz/library/
