Yes John and Greg have described the reasoning quite well.
We have had hours of discussions and planning around this issue and
believe me Horst, I wish we didnt need to manage licence keys nor to
charge larger organisations.
I think Nigel's approach (although we have spent hours on modeling that
business model) is just not going to work in Australia because of the
small market. Our figures show that we just wouldnt get enough money
out of support from the path, radiology and hospital sector to sustain
our core operations (even at our current skeleton level). We just had
to charge for the product in order to get sufficient revenue. I would
love to change all this and not charge at all. We also 'market tested'
charging GPs and specialist for support and got a far stronger negative
response than Horst 'giving us a serve' on this forum. We put aside
that idea quickly.
There are a couple of other rationales for having a licence key for
which we again couldnt come up with a satisfactory alternative. (By
'satisfactory' I mean 'wouldnt create more headaches than we currently
have' or 'wouldnt compromise entirely our sustainability' or 'wouldnt
degrade our service or product from a user point of view') - I know I
will get a strong response from Horst on this one - I am waiting and
ready to duck! :-[
The success and utility of the Argus Uses Directory (central LDAP)
relies on it being current and cover all Argus users. All Argus users
are relying more and more on the fact that they can be confident that a
recipient details of PKI key and email address can be easily obtained
from the Argus Users Directory. Mostly they can get this
automatically. Experience with other such central directories has been
that this is VERY costly to maintain if someone takes on the task
centrally, or alternatively if they rely on voluntary update by users,
they end up with an incomplete and largely useless directory. We also
introduced the licence key in order to capture all users details at time
of registration so we could get their entry on the Argus Users Directory.
Finally, because we provide support free to GPs and specialists (again
some have questioned our rationale for that, but that is another
matter), if we didnt have some registration process we would be
completely in the dark as to how many users we had, what type of users
they were and basic information about their environment. I know Horst
would say "why do you want to know that" but believe me, it is far
easier to manage resources, cater for users, be proactive to contact
users about issues and respond to Help Desk calls, if we already know
something about those users, who they are and where to get hold of
them. So we maintain some basic information gathered at registration
time in order to be able to respond to user Help Desk calls more
effectively and also to manage our resources. (I can remember when MD2
in the early days just sent out their software to thousands of doctors,
they regretted constantly after that the fact that they never knew how
many users they had, and who their users were)
I know all these issues are a matter of debate and we are more than
happy to change if someone comes up with a better (workable) alternative.
We will always listen to you Horst. (In fact I am working in the
background to try to get support to become more 'free' in line with your
wishes) It seems that half my time is spent with staff trying to work
out how to do things better and we still are trying.
cheers
Ross
-------------------------------
Ross Davey
CEO
ArgusConnect Pty Ltd
Ph: 03 5335 2220
Mob: 0417 548608
Web: www.argusconnect.com.au
-------------------------------
Greg Twyford wrote:
John Mackenzie wrote:
Horst, I think what the problem might be ...
Yes, Argus was started by some funding from the NT Division.
But the amount of work put into Argus has *greatly* exceeded
this initial seed funding.
So, now the good people at Argus are making the program
free to GPs and specialists. But they do need to recoup some
money for their past and continuing efforts which has NOT
been met by the past seed funding. To do this, Argus is not
making the program free to corporate pathology or radiology
practices.
John/Horst/List,
What has been discussed on the list before, and reiterated by Ross is
that the IP for Argus basically belongs to the Commonwealth.
Attending the Argus Forum in May 2004 was an illuminating experience.
Ross and his team are doing something no one has done before, which is
to tread a middle-ground in order to, on the one hand, prevent the
project ending up in a Canberra filing cabinet, and on the other, to
compete in a market where it can't be a fully commercial product.
Nor, I suspect, that fully 'giving away' the IP to Argus could be done
without raising bureaucratic ire, with the risk that it would lead to
it being shut-down by government, even now. It seems to me they are
treading a very cautious path, that no-doubt frustrates Horst and
others, but I remember Ross' words very well.
They have to serve a number of masters to keep the project going, and
I don't believe that anyone except their commercial rivals would think
that it's demise would be a good thing.
The reports today of adoption in some Division areas is good news.
Greg
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